10 SEO & Social Media Posts To Read Before MIMA Summit

10 SEO & Social Media Posts To Read Before MIMA Summit: "

2008 MIMA Summit at The Depot

In just under a week the annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association Summit will be held downtown Minneapolis at the Hilton. With keynotes from Seth Godin and Jackie Huba as well as a collection of local and national subject matter experts ranging from Greg Swan of Weber Shandwick to Scott Monty of Ford, it should be a veritable vortex of interactive velocity.  I apologize, that alliteration was so bad.

Anyway, TopRank has been asked to participate in the “Migrate” themed event on the topic of search engine optimization and social media convergence.

After writing, presenting and most importantly: being a paid consultant and self-practitioner of SEO (12 years) and Social Media Marketing (5 years) respectively, I thought it would be a good appetizer for next week’s presentation to highlight some of the most popular blog posts covering SEO and social media marketing from  Online Marketing Blog.

Top SEO and Social Media Marketing Posts from Online Marketing Blog:

(by traffic in the past 12 months)

1. 25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips (Apr 27th, 2009) – This popular post offers specific advice on justifying investment in social media strategy, how to decide on tactics and measuring success from in-house social media marketers including: Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Intel, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil and a mix of SMM consultants/agencies: Altimeter Group, Crayon, Ogilvy 360, Future Works, Doe Anderson, New Marketing Labs and others.

2. Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR (Nov 15th, 2007) – Excerpt: “The key with Twitter is not to look at microblogging as individual posts, but think of the overall impressions and value that can be created over time. Each 140 character or less entry serves as a seed of an idea for an overall objective. Over time, you’ll build a footprint and brand of influence within the Twitter community”. This post also includes tips from other early adopter Tweeple including:Andy Beal, Todd Defren and Michael Gray.

3. Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing (Feb 12th, 2009) – Many marketers are unsure about the difference between best and worst practices when it comes to commercial participation on the social web. Identifying best and worst practics is a work in progress of course, as communities develop, grow and change.  This post outlines the basic best/worst practices that will hold true for years to come. Internet years that is.

4. 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog (Jun 15th, 2006) – An oldie but goodie, this post contains many of the fundamentals for creating search engine friendly blogs and has been cited by over 14,000 web sites including Search Engine Land, Copyblogger, Mashable, Stuntdubl, SEOBook, Duct Tape Marketing a and HubSpot.

5. What is Your Social Media Marketing Strategy? (Mar 25th, 2008) – Social media is hot, every body’s doing it. But the question needs to be asked: why? This post offers several good business reasons why companies should invest time, money and resources into social media.

6. Top Ten SEO Tips for PR Professionals (Apr 29th, 2009) – After presenting these ten tips at a public relations conference, I blogged the presentation and wrote another blog post detailing each of the ten tips. It should have been an ebook, but I decided it would reach more people as a series of 11 blog posts.

7. 16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited (Aug 4th, 2009) – A follow up to a post originally published in 2006 that defined a new marketing category, this 3,117 word article by TopRank’s Adam Singer offers an update that resonated well with Online Marketing Blog readers. Is social media optimization still relevant and why?

8. 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites (Mar 20th, 2009) –  KISS, as in Keep It Simple Stupid. It’s sage advice for many things, including blog posts. This link building basics post from TopRank’s Dana Larson hit the nail on the head for many new web site owners in search of those ever elusive first links to boost search engine rankings.

9. Lowdown on Press Release Optimization (Oct 24th, 2005) – One of the first really popular blog posts we ever published, still gets new links every week from sites like WebProNews, Bruce Clay, Techipedia, LED Digest and Yahoo.

10. SEO Basics: 6 Tips for Google Webmaster Tools (Apr 7th, 2009) – Google set the stage for formal search engine support of the webmaster community by developing Webmaster Tools (thanks Vanessa Fox) and TopRank’s Thomas McMahon wrote up this popular tips post highlighting some very useful features.

BONUS!  While not one of the most popular posts overall in the past year, a few recent entries made on Online Marketing Blog speak specifically to the presentation I’ll be giving at the MIMA Summit next week:

SEO & Social Media Roadmap – How do you plan for a social media strategy? How do you leverage the Yin/Yang benefits of both SEO and Social Media for objectives, tactics, specific tools and measuring goals? This post attempts to answer those questions specifically.

Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success – This post was published over at Mashable and focuses on making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics through development of a roadmap.  Like any digital marketing effort, a combined SEO and social media program is most effective that identifies a target audience, specifies measurable goals and a strategy to guide implementation of tactics.

Hopefully your appetite has been stimulated enough to come to our  MIMA Summit SEO/Social session right after Seth Godin’s keynote. If not, you’ll definitely have actionable tips you can use in your SEO and Social Media Marketing efforts today.

Session Details:

The Intersection of SEO and Social Media

Oct 5, 2009 – 9:45 am

Tactics Track, Salon C

Hilton, Minneapolis

Session Overview:

Successful social media efforts build community, better connect brands with customers and can influence both media coverage and increased sales. Yet implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content for search is literally “leaving money on the table.” Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio and applications) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach audiences that are looking.

Why do so many companies fail to leverage their participation on the social web for SEO? This session will provide specific “Do’s and Don’ts” of social media optimization and provide attendees practical examples of how companies can leverage SEO and social media content to improve their search marketing performance.

If you like video, here’s an interview with Phil Wilson of Minnov8 & myself talking about SEO/Social and what I’ll be presenting at MIMA Summit.

Win a Free Pass to the MIMA Summit!

Want to attend the sold-out MIMA Summit in Minneapolis next week but didn’t get your ticket in time?  Or maybe you’re a Seth Godin fan and just can’t stand the fact that you’ll miss hearing him speak in person.  Well dear readers, we just might have the solution to that problem.  TopRank Online Marketing has one extra ticket from the corporate table we purchased for the MIMA Summit and we’re going to give it away.

All you have to do is leave a single comment below with a creative and/or compelling reason why we should give YOU a free ticket to next week’s MIMA Summit ($595 value) OR if you Tweet a similarly creative link to this post, that will show up in our comments too. We’ll pick one lucky winner on Thursday Oct 1st.

Sound easy? Sound doable? Then get to it.  If you comment, be sure to enter your email address so we can contact you. If you Tweet, be sure to follow @toprank so we can DM you. We will ONLY contact you if you win and will not rent, sell, post, hack or do anything unsavory or sinister with the information you provide.

Obligatory Q and A:

Q: Does it include gratuitous coffee in the morning before Seth speaks?

A: If MIMA provides it with the corporate table tickets, then you get it. Pretty sure they’ll be offering coffee. Maybe even some bacon.

Q: Does it include lunch?

A: Pretty sure lunch is included. If not, I’ll buy you lunch.

Q: Does it include door to door pickup service from my home in Ham Lake to downtown Minneapolis with sidetrips to Starbucks on the way there and Lucia’s Wine Bar on the way home?

A: I don’t think so.

Q: OK, what about cab fare?

A: Nope.

Q: Transit pass?

A: Not going to happen.

Q: Bus fare?

A: That would be, ah, no.

Q: Schwag?

A: MIMA Summit events and sponsors have been amazing with their schwag generosity. Can’t imagine this year will be any different.

However, we might bring a TopRank mugs. We’d bring the TopRank Old English Sheep dog, but he has a sinus infection and believe me, you don’t want to be around when a 90lb sheep dog sneezes.

Any other questions? Please Tweet them to @toprank or email seo at toprank dot org

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10 SEO & Social Media Posts To Read Before MIMA Summit |
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Developing a Methodology

Looking at Social Media communication plans as a dealing with interacting genre sets can help create that plan.  In combination with activity theory, there could follow an effective set of practices for implementing a social media plan and for measuring its effectiveness (more on this later).   

The plan for this project would be to develop a methodology for implementing and maintaining and social media plan for any particular organization.  The next step would be to analyze an organization actual uses of social media and determine their strengths and weaknesses.   

Genre Systems and Health Care

I'm sure everyone has seen the numerous videos on YouTube of the Tea Party's, the town hall meetings, and other responses to current politcal and cultural environment of the United States.  This post is not here to offer sentimentent on any side of the debate.  Rather this post is an attempt to state a methodology for tracing these complex genre systems that seeming arise out of thin air without any sense of control or discourse.  

Besides videos, you can live the discontent on Facebook (Nation Wide Tax Day Tea Party, Americans Against Obamacare, Universal Health Care),  blog posts (The Obamacare Story you Won't Here, Obamacare and Redstate Democrats, America's Re-Tea Party, Ezra Klein), and even Wikis (Conservapedia on Obamacare )

The idea is that this discourse is bloated and chaotic. There are so many forums in which texts are produced that having some sense of control over the issue is near impossible. Don't forget, I tapped the tip of the surfaced part of the iceberg with the examples that I presented.

So, the issue is this: how does one create a an effective social media plan for any instance with any company or organization knowing full well that putting information on the web is like throwing a message in a bottle and dumping it in the ocean with the expectation that you can choose who that message goes to and how it will be read and used.

In addition, when information is put online, anything could happen to it. Even if an organization does months of research into creating a social media system, that does not mean they will have complete control over the system (how it functions, what media will be used, and so on), and they will not have control on how the information will be transplanted in other online systems.  

Part of my research will include how an organization can create an effective genre system that works for them instead of against them. More posts on this later.

The Trouble with "The Trouble with Twitters"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

If you refer to a previous blog post--http://walkingcharley.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-am-under-impression-that-memex.html

--you will see that new technologies that offer new way of recording and transformating information take a while to be learned by users.  Essentially, they are forming new literate practices.  The user must do cost benefit analysis to determine if learning the new practice is worth it or not.  

In the case of Twitter, users began using the system in different ways to fit their needs.  You can see this entry for detail on this matter:  http://walkingcharley.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-20-usability-and-participatory.html.

But users must also discover how the system can be useful.  As the video illustrates, this can sometimes be hard to discover.  But, tell the voters in Iran that Twitter is not useful.  So far, it has been the fastest news source ever.  When there were gas shortages in the Carolinas,  people would let others know which stations had gas on Twitter.  At this point, we just getting to the point seeing how blogging and social networking technologies will be useful to the individual.  

"Age of Rhetoricality"

John Bender and David E. Wellbery in their chapter "Rhetoricaaity:  On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric." in The Ends of Rhetoric:  History, Theory, and Practice explains that rhetoric is no longer practiced as it was in antiquity.  They argue that "modernism is an age not of rhetoric, but rhetoricality" (25).  He argues that rhetoric was maintained within a specific "set of limitations" relating to a particular purpose and goal, topoi.  In modern times, rhetoricality is defined by not fixed point of discourse.  There are no viewable set of limitations in defining rhetoric as a pragmatic art.     Instead well formed institutions, we have decentralized points of power and overlapping discourses.

And this was true of the modern era until the time of  web 2.0.  Web 2.0 in effect turned everyone into a meaningful orator who could potentially influence a discourse on a substantial level.  The economic concept of the long tail illustrates how marketing has turned into creating a band wagon to creating smaller yet numerous communities of stakeholders who have considerable amounts of power in the smaller discourses.   

Bender and Wellbery affirm that his plurality does not allow for a single definition of rhetoric that classical times allowed.  However this is not to say that today's rhetoricians do not possesses a specialized set of literacy skills that allow them to function in the production processes of knowledge and meaning.

As the video in my previous post showed, a majority of people who have access to these technologies are voicing their ideas within the limitations of the genres the are using and the discourses in which they function.  Rhetorics seemed to be a more appropriate term when describing the current idea of rhetorical studies today.   There are still a specialized skill set needed in determine one's ability to take any particular rhetoric and be effective with it.      

"Social Media Revolution"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Digital Medical Records

Dr.  Paul Felden, a primary care physician stands amid his labyrinth of patient records, isolated in his offices in Mount Laural, NJ (picture taken from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/technology/19patient.html).

The problem is many patients see more more than one doctor, each with their own isolated room of medical records.  It is a very Web 1.0 world in the medical field.  Intertextual between doctors is complex and cumbersome.  A cancer patient who receives care, consultations, and treatments may interact with a number of health care professional including doctors (primary care and specialists), nurses, psychiatrists, insurances reps, and so on.  All of them may be looking at isolated medical records that could only show pieces of the puzzle.  

Not to mention the trouble for doctors.  In aforementioned article, journalist Steve Lorh writes "Dr. Paul Feldan, one of three doctors in a primary care practice in Mount Laurel, N.J., considered investing in electronic health records, and decided against it. The initial cost of upgrading the office’s personal computers, buying new software and obtaining technical support to make the shift would be $15,000 to $20,000 a doctor, he estimated. Then, during the time-consuming conversion from paper to computer records, the practice would be able to see far fewer patients, perhaps doubling the cost." 

Recalling a previous post, new digital recording technologies come with an inherent cost vs benefit analysis.  Is the time and money used in learning and installing the system into the everyday practice of the worklplace actually worth it?

The idea is getting more traction with recent attention on Health Care Reform.  Parts of the bill may include tax breaks for doctors who switch to digital records.  Right now, not many are arguing against the need for digital records.  They arguing over who is going to pay for it.  

But, there are still questions about how this system will look, work, and feel.  I believe questions of interface and functionality have to be addressed before these plans go on ahead.  There is some suggestions that digital records will exist in a cloud-based system that has records on the internet, which will elements of genre system.  

In fact, web 2.0 culture beckons the idea that collaboration has to occur for production to be effective and collaboration has to be accomplished through a system of genres.  So, and I'm just speculating here, we might see patient records that include, shared videos and photos, comments, and discussions between different doctors over treatments and procedures.  A 2nd opinion will look less than helpful compared to 3-4 doctor discussion on your medical records.         

Genre Systems and Social Media

I hope to now switch the blog to a particular focus on genre systems in the web 2.0 culture.  With the advent of web 2.0, discourses have interacting on a regular basis and texts and meaning are being processed through a carefully and organically constructed system of genres.  Viral Videos, Blogs, Mini-Blogs (Tweets), Photo Sharing, Social Networking Groups and Pages, Websites, Wikis all constructing meaning for one set of social actions.  

Multiplicity hasn't all of a sudden taken over.  Genre systems have existed for a while.  Web 2.0 has however, made these systems much more transparent.  The Iranian Elections and the Health Care debate all beckoned texts that were created out a system of multiple genres.  

This blog will hopefully reveal some examples of these genre systems, and how professional writers must learn to construct and interact with these systems to create effective, pragmatic, and humane communication.  

Twitter as Usability Tool

Recently, columnist David Pogue of the New York Times, asked his Twitter followers what new gadgets they would like to see on the market (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/your-favorite-uninvented-gadget/).  And he got some interesting responses.  Someone asked for self charing batteries, waterproof cell phones, wireless power for laptops (somebody beat you to it:  http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html), solar panels for lap tops and so on. 

But the significance to technical communication has to do with usability studies.  People have been using the web for feedback on products since the internet BA (the internet before amazon).  The fact is consumers have been involved in the marketing process since social media went Google.  However, product design has largely been in the hands of the companies not the consumer.  Now, good companies did usability testing and read consumer reviews before then.  But with social media, consumers are voicing the problems that prevent them from completing necessary tasks on large forum like Twitter and Facebook.  And these users are coalescing.  Groups of users rambling their discontent on the wonderfully democratic internet.  Users are moving from being simply discontent about how their products are designed to demanding a more user-centered process of production.  And the forums on which they can shout are free and many.        

I am under the impression that Memex machine looks like Orville's time machine.  Both are from the same desire for omniscience in having all knowledge packaged adnd recallable before your finger tips.  A network of documents is created leaving behind an evolution of meaning.  It is a roadmap of how we got where we are. 

Today, we have digital tools such as the internet that allows memory to be stored and recalled in digital form drawing a clear connection between memory and invention.

The recent article "Distributing Memory:  Rhetorical Work in Digital Environments" attempts to to show that connection.  Derek Van Ittersum takes this to the next level by memorizing literate practices.  He analyzes the graduate students ability to integrate the use of One Note into their note taking and recording practices.  Some of these students are in the process of writing their thesis.  He looked at the One Note as a digital memory devices that also work as invention tools.  

The main question:  Is the labor required in learning the new practice worth the overall benefit.  This questions builds a interesting and complex relationship between literacy and memory.  

How should we quantify effort vs. effect in examining the usability of these tools?