Our popular Give It Up! session is where our panel of experts share some of their favourite and largely overlooked tips. Then we turn to the audience for more sharing. At SMX Advanced London, we’re introducing our social media edition of the panel, where you’ll learn some fantastic ways to gain even more traction, traffic and reach via social media marketing.
Moderator: Ciaran Norris, Head of Social Media Marketing, Mindshare Worldwide
Q&A Moderator: Kevin Ryan, Chief Executive, Motivity Marketing, Inc.
Speakers:
- Chris Bennett, President/Founder, 97th Floor
- Parks Blackwell, Senior Client Development Manager, Range Online Media
- Melissa Campbell, SEO Consultant, Distilled
- Ciaran Norris, Head of Social Media Marketing, Mindshare Worldwide
(The below are Tim’s notes from the “The Give It Up, Social Media Edition” session at SMX Advanced. They have been posted during the session and will be tidied up later – more SMX coverage here)
Chris Bennett
Infographics
Infographics working very well. Can go very viral and pick up a mass of backlinks. Can create a link profile that competitors can’t replicate. What makes them good?
- Lots of data
- Complex ideas
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Otherwise boring topics!
Some commercial sites being banned in Digg, can get them removed. Rumours that commercial sites going to be looked on more favourably. But in meantime solution is to set up separate site – viral hubs e.g. visualeconomics – over 50000 natural banklinks in 9 months.
Guest virals
Take viral content and find high profile sites and contact directly and get them to put it on their site in return for link bank with anchor etc and let them take the traffic. Infographics do very well here.
Other Viral Tips
- reach out to all those who are linking and thank them so can create a relationship with them. Can then e-mail them directly and 9/10 they’ll put up your content
- track all your success – e.g. outgoing clicks to signups
- Social Media for firefox plugin
Parks Blackwell
Basics that people are missing out on
Content
Must have a content strategy. repeating same messages then you will lose followers. OK to align with marketing calendars but must have more updates “in the trenches” stuff.
Transparency
No one wants to be part of a community that isn’t genuine. Allowing feedback is a must. Post REAL updates. Get a voice that understands the customer
Monitor
Make a decision before you start. Know what you want to get out of it and correlate metrics with this. Changing metrics half way through can alter transparency.
Melissa Campbell
The laws and guidelines in the UK that you are probably breaking!
ASA
ASA applies to virals and therefore can result in violations. Things going wrong:
- not making the source clear (false identities)
- being wilfully offensive to gain attention
- misuse of email database e..g run a competition and then put them on newsletter list
Requires a complaint to be made before you will get in trouble
Digital Economy Act
Know where your images, videos etc come from and credit properly. Written by music industry for music industry
SMX Presentation
Q&A/Audience Tips
- Enforcement? MC: Likely to be difficult to enforce, lot of misunderstanding.
- How long does it take to create typical infographic? CB: Couple of days, though research can take time. Use students to do research. Clients given chance of one revision only.
- Observation: people like questions to be answered in the open when communicating through the likes of Twitter. CB: Put out name of senior bod that they can contact.
- When doing microsites, are you redirecting? CB: In some cases but mentioned site was so successful that haven’t. Tend not to do 301 anymore, much better to own trusted site.
- With new version of Digg, will all banned sites be unbanned? CB: Probably July, in meantime e-mail them. Tip don’t submit best thing next day, build account back up slowly.
- How rife are fake names in academic world? MC: Can be very embarrassing if caught out. Such an obvious thing to do, its likely to be happening.
