In economics, supply and demand describe market relations between prospective sellers and buyers of a good. (wikipedia.org)
In search engine optimization, we can use the supply and demand model to describe the relationship between the people searching for specific keywords (the demand) and the people creating content to meet that demand (the supply).
The following is a simplified explanation on how to visualize the supply and demand of keywords.
Living in the middle of San Diego and trying to find out the latest news on the fires and evacuations has lead to some interesting discoveries into the power of the Social Web.
Hats off to the San Diego Union Tribune. They have outdone themselves in the way they have presented the news using social media.
The San Diego Union Tribune created a blog called Wildfires 2007 that is updated almost every 10 minutes or so giving the latest information and resources for the San Diego fires.
Running History
What makes this incredibly helpful is that by using the blog format, San Diego Union Tribute has created a running history, with date and timestamps of all the events and information that are happening with this emergency.
Social Contributions
Because it’s a blog, people can make comments on all the updates. Many of the comments are congratulating the paper for being the best resource out there for up-to-date information. However, some of them are sharing details that only the citizens involved could do.
Here is a sample comment stream from one of the San Diego Union Tribune blog posts:
RSS for Updates
Again, because the Union Tribune is keeping this blog updated many times an hour, people can subscribe to the feed and get the latest information on their cell phones, PDA’s, laptops, or any other device that would have access to the internet and a feed reader or web browser.
Outside of the satellite imagery, some of the best photos of this fire have been taken by people who have been there and have shared their digital photos with the world through Flickr and other photo sharing sites. In addition, because of the social nature of the photo sharing sites, many visitors are leaving comments — giving you a human side that is often left out in mainstream news media.
Some Examples…
MSNBC.com provides a service called First Person. It is a collection of images and videos sent in by the users of the web site.
I like that they are including a social element into their site. All the images look fantastic, so it also looks like there is a human editing element in place to really showcase the videos and the images that will provide the greatest impact. Although this filters out the lot of bad images that people take, I can also see how this type of “selection” could lead to media-glorification-for-ratings through the guise of Social Media.
I’m especially impressed with the San Diego Union Tribune and the authors who are constantly updating their blog through this time of crisis.
In addition, I would like to mention the 1,000’s of bloggers that share their side of the story during events like the San Diego wild fires. These contributions have changed the way we read our news and learn about our current events. It’s easy to take this for granted and amazing to think that not long ago this wasn’t even available.
I believe that the web will be changed for the better as more and more organizations and businesses alike begin to use the power of Social Media and user contributions.
If you do, or if you hire someone that does, you may reconsider after reading this post.
I’ve struggled with this for years. Deep down I tell myself that if I don’t build a site or web app from the ground up, then I’m probably going to regret it in the future.
However, as the internet develops and standard models emerge, there are some “tools” that are becoming the basis of almost every site I work on these days.
When you think of search engines like toddlers, the concepts for search engine optimization (SEO) get much more simple.
With young children, you need to make things extra easy in order for them to understand. Take children’s books for example. They usually consist of a few words per page and cut right to he point.
The same thing applies to search engines. You need to make it crystal clear what each page is about, and when they understand what each page is about, they know how to rank you. The more clear, the better chance of top rankings.
A new trend is developing in the world of Social Media: Customer Clustering — A method of grouping your customers who have similar interests and adding the basics of social networking.
Seth Godin wrote a great post today on his blog regarding how the search engines have “broken the world into little tiny bits.”
I think it’s a great observation, and it’s not just search engines. It’s social media as a whole! Whether your site got stumbled, you have traffic coming in from your RSS feed subscribers, or your latest article just made the Digg front page, it’s becoming less and less common that all traffic starts at your home page and explores your site from there.
Below, is the way a typical site is laid out. Everything starts with the home page, you have your main navigation off that, and finally you get to the pages that contain the specific information visitors are looking for.
The Social Arena includes hundreds of sites and millions of users. An understanding of these networks will turn your business into an automated vehicle for profit creation.
With the information below, you will have the tools necessary to drive extraordinary qualified traffic to your web site and build your brand as a knowledgeable expert in your industry or niche market.
A huge thanks to AJAXflakes.com for compiling (and testing) a list of over 300 social bookmarking sites on the web. These sites are grouped into categories that makes it easy to find the type of site that you are looking for.
As an added bonus, the Page Rank and description for each site is also included!
Yahoo! offers a whole slew of free tools for “anyone creating content” (their words, not mine) on the web. Although some of the tools are only related to their companies (like del.icio.us for bookmarking), overall they provide quick functionality to make your blog or web site a little user-friendlish.
Y!Q allows you to place contextual searches within your posts or content. Unlike other contextual linking tools, this one doesn’t create a pop-up javascript window as soon as you rollover. So it stops your visitors from wanting to chuck their computer out the window while reading your content.
It also comes in two flavors “contextual” and “inline”. I prefer the inline, since it is less intrusive and doesn’t require the reader to jump pages unless they find something of interest.
Collin Grady put together a Wordpress Plugin for Y!Q.
This tool has been around, and in beta, for a couple years. Please leave a comment on why you would or wouldn’t use this.
These buttons allow you to quickly add functionality for: bookmarking (only on del.icio.us), sending (via default email client), blogging (via Yahoo! 360), and printing.
Ok Yahoo, so I can see how you want to promote your own companies, but limiting how it’s blogged and how it’s bookmarked really limits the number of people that would want to really use these tools for their full potential anyway (leave a comment if you agree or disagree). Del.icio.us is the select choice for online bookmarking, by providing capabilities for other tools, you would probably get more users for del.icio.us anyway.
Unlike the Y!Q, this is actually very easy to place into a blog post. For WordPress, use the HeadSpace 2 plugin to include the required javascript on the individual posts you would want to include these buttons on.
Either way, the bookmarking, print, and emailing quick links have their purposes.
You have three options: search your site, search Yahoo! News, and search the web. All of which you can turn on or off. It does include the Yahoo! logo beneath the search box, but it also includes the functionality for “popular searches”. I thought this was pretty nifty.
You are able to specify the width that you want, so it’s easy to fit it in any layout. And last but not least, you can adjust the color themes.
All this is done in a couple steps, and Yahoo! provides a management tool to handle the search engines you create. I can’t complain there.
Social Media Marketing takes time and patience, but when done correctly has tremendous rewards. The following are some ideas and exercises to help you get started in the right direction…
Once you have all the preparation completed for Social Media Marketing, you should know what keywords will generate quality traffic, what types of content may become viral, how to position your company as an industry expert, how to advertise without advertising, and more.
However, Social Media Marketing doesn’t stop there. It takes practice, patience, quality content, and last but not least, ongoing maintenance, measurement and optimization.
The following is a diagram describing the ongoing tasks that Chief Ingredient completes for their clients:
Affiliate solutions can be a great way to promote your business. Many shopping cart applications now include an affiliate program framework.
There are also a number of online web solutions that cater specifically to building full-blown affiliate programs and solutions.
With your business you can take advantage of both angles:
Each “connection” or “friend” is a gateway to more traffic.
The key is networking
Use the bulletin-type features the same way you would post to a social bookmarking site.
Blogging is a fantastic way to:
The following are some basic guidelines to follow when creating and posting on a blog for your company.
Chief Ingredient has specialized staff ready to provide information on creative ways to increase the power of your company’s blog, contact Chief Ingredient for more information. (www.chiefingredient.com)
Q&A-type sites have been around in some form or another for many years. However, until recently they haven’t made a large impact in the scene.
In today’s World Wide Web, even the big players are getting in on the Q&A action. Yahoo has their own “answers” community. LinkedIn.com has recently made a Q&A section available within their online networking framework. Both have a tremendous following and provide a wide variety of solutions to many different types of answer-seekers.
Q&A sites come in many different formats and cater to a wide variety of target markets.
Check out www.ideaspit.com. A Chief Ingredient solution designed specifically for entrepreneurs.
IdeaSpit allows you to ask questions and get important marketplace feedback BEFORE your product or service is created.
It also allows you to build up a prospect list of people who are interested in more info and includes polling and discussion tools to allow direct communication with future customers.
Most Q&A sites won’t let you rant or rave
Secretly posting questions as ads is not a good idea
Market testing and research can be difficult on many of the Q&A web sites
One of the best ways to use Question and Answer sites is by answering questions and actively offering solutions, ideas, advice and suggestions through comments
Social bookmarking is an integral part to any Social Arena Marketing campaign. It enables your content to be easily found, saved and shared.
With the right keywords included in the content, you may find your bookmarked content appearing on search engines like Google in as little as 24 hours.
Looking at what trends are popular will allow you to turn ordinary content into potentially viral contributions.
Example Trend:
Green / Eco-Friendly Related Content
This trend is growing by the day. In addition, it is becoming one of the most important movements in our time. Not only will this trend help you enhance your content, it will also help you think about possibilities for turning your own business green.
Usage example: If you offer apartment moving services, they you could create content around how to be “green” when moving – what boxes to use, how to dispose of chemicals and batteries, etc…
Here are some popular trends to help you get your brainstorming sessions thundering in the distance:
Many businesses will have a valuable asset which most of the other community contributors will not have: Employees.
To help jump start a viral movement with your business’s content or contributions, you will have the option of using your employee base as the beginning of your online network, social supporters, followers, friends, and other elements contributing to the Social Arena.
The following illustration shows how fast a network can grow in the Social Arena. It could start with one business that has three employees and easily grow to a network of 39 with the right content.
To help jump start a viral movement, you could:
Each new post, comment, or network connection is the direct link to more quality and qualified traffic.
In addition, the more relevant content you have in the Social Arena, the more chances you have of being found both in search engines and within the highly trafficked Social Arena Web Sites.
Although substantial quality traffic can be achieved without “going viral” from your viral campaign, reaching a viral status may be the goal for contributors using Social Arena Marketing and viral marketing campaigns.
Based on what can be seen with currently popular viral marketing campaigns and content, most fit into one of the following categories:
As a business or CEO, the most beneficially and possibly easiest category for a viral marketing campaign would be the last category: Very helpful and Unique.
Caution should be used in your viral marketing campaigns when the possibility for exponential viral traffic is available. There have been countless web sites brought to their knees when a surge of traffic and server requests are generated from their viral marketing campaigns.
You must ensure you have the hardware and server capacities to handle the traffic should a viral event occur. Be sure to check with your server administrator.
The following information contained within this category pertains to Social Media Marketing as a whole. It includes the basic guidelines and provides the framework for all concepts and advanced strategies included in the remainder of this blog and others associated with it.
When available, create usernames and account names using your most valuable keywords
If the account has profile information, be sure to fill out as much as possible.
Content is king (or queen)
Use the sites contained within the Social Arena as they are designed
