Making social networks personal

You are a part of one or have seen heaps of buzz about them. Social networks are here to stay and are only going to get bigger.

From an advertiser’s perspective it’s pretty hard to grab someone’s attention and keep them focused on your adverts. So many times have I seen companies pour millions of dollars down the drain on social network advertising, in the hope that people will buy their products or services?

So why doesn’t advertising work on social networks?

All the online marketing gurus say it’s about building brand awareness, and it is to some extent. But if you have been in the business long enough, you’ll know that measuring brand effectiveness can be very expensive and time consuming. There are a lot of companies out there that provide these services such as Nielson Buzz Metrics, but be warned – only if you’re willing to spend the big bucks.
Don’t get me wrong, BRAND is important, but like any sales or marketing person will say “Show me the money!”

So how can we leverage off social networks and actually take some ROI?

I have a theory and as cliché as it might sound, it’s about getting personal and understanding the “4 core elements” of personality groups and targeting them based on their characteristics.

If you are a marketer or not, most companies target their databases into areas that are functional, beneficial and emotionally appealing – which is mostly known as the value proposition. But before that is concluded they break their databases down into segments which are usually based on primary and secondary research.

Online segmentation is however measured differently as other elements come into play such as time spent, bounce rates, etc. This can be very difficult to do and is also extremely time consuming.
But what if there were another way to segment and target a core set of consumers online based on your value proposition? I believe you can – through social networks.

I strongly believe that the future of online targeting will be based on a person’s characteristics.

Here are some advantages:

• Personalised communication strategies for campaigns
• Greater understanding of behavioural patterns
• Making each experience relevant, personal and engaging

Now here comes the cliché part, based on astrology (I know, for all you men out here banging your heads against the wall, there is some logic behind this) you can “assume” all people share common characteristics based on their element sign.

These are broken down into 4 elements:

• Fire = Leo, Aries & Sagittarius
Are known to be; irresponsible, impatient, boastful, positive, extraverted, active, creative, ingenious, dynamic, highly energetic, outspoken, fiery temper, passionate, emotionally intense

• Water = Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces
Are known to be; deeply intuitive, imaginative, emotional, reserved, not gregarious, exceedingly passionate, self pity, sensitive, pessimistic, overly vague, secretive

• Earth = Capricorn, Virgo, Taurus
As known to be; stable, practical, realistic, cautious, hard-working, dependable, highly materialistic, inhibited, introverted, down to earth, calm

• Air = Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Are known to be; free spirited, philosophical, intellectual, open minded, idealistic, adventurous, restless, unpredictable, interactive, extraverted, emotionally aloof, opinionated

Even if you don’t believe in astrology – it’s about finding the right set of ‘people characteristics’ for your product or service. Understanding the personality that wants or needs your products or services is important and knowing how to leverage on that.

Because at the end of the day, they will be your distribution channel when it comes to word of mouth or recommending your product or service to other people online and offline.

So having the right personality representing your brand will be just as important as the way you communicate across all channels.

Popularity: 56%

Proper SEO and SEM techniques are often things that marketing managers have to learn themselves. They certainly weren’t teaching it when I graduated college back in 2005. No matter how much we research or how hard we try, it’s all too easy to find ourselves in some sticky situations by doing things we never knew were wrong. I’m talking of course, about Black Hat SEO practices. Here’s a list of things (in alphabetical order) everyone should avoid in order to keep their website from being banned from every major search engine out there. You’ll notice that a lot of ideas listed below are simply a matter of good ethics or common sense, but just in case you didn’t get the memo…

Astro-Turfing
Don’t launch a fake PR campaign or create a social networking upheaval based on false information just to generate traffic to your website.

Celebrity Look-A-Likes
When someone posts blogs, or creates blogs and forums under the name of someone significant. By “significant” I mean either a celebrity or someone who is well recognized in their industry. This celebrity impersonator will usually post comments or blogs that are damaging to a competitor. A less illegal, but certainly just as immoral act would be if an industry guru posted discouraging comments on their competitor’s site anonymously to ultimately drive traffic back to their own website.

Cloaking
Another form of misrepresentation. It’s when you are Showing one set of keywords and content to spiders and bots and a separate set of content to visitors.

Code Swapping
Other wise known as the “old switcharoo.” This is when companies take a top ranking page URL (usually one they’ve purchased) and swap it around so that it shows a different page that benefits their business. This is almost always a temporary fix, so it doesn’t make much sense to swap code if you don’t need to. Most companies have legitimate reasons to swap around their code if they are changing their business model or even owners. However, swapping code for the purposes of duping search engines is against the rules.

Doorway Site
Similar to gateway sites, but instead of having a link or redirection tool that the user follows, the user actually never even sees the doorway site. It’s just a fake page used to trick spiders into indexing the main page higher up on the SE.

Gateway Site
These can be identified as web pages with practically no content in them except for some (possibly hidden) keywords. They usually have some sort of text in the center or up top that says: “Click here to enter” They have no use to the web surfer, and their purpose is to simply rank high in SE results so that people can click on that link and be taken to the real website, which may not rank as well or have scammy content.

Google Bombs
Remember when you learned that if you Googled “miserable failure” George Bush’s website would pop up at the top of the SE list? That happened because hundreds (thousands?) of people linked Dubbya’s Whitehouse homepage to their websites by hyperlinking the words “miserable failure”. That was just a collective joke, but when one person Google bombs it can get them penalized or even banned – and that’s not funny. A website owner can create a Google bomb by hyperlinking the same (usually irrelevant) text to the same URL on various other websites. This will allow them to jump up in ratings when people Google that keyword. That is, until they get banned.

Google Bowling
Google bowling is essentially sabotage. It’s when a company links SEO spam links to a competing company’s website in hopes that Google will penalize or banish their competitor.

Invisible text
Not commonly used anymore since it’s easy to get caught. It’s when irrelevant keywords and phrases are hidden on a webpage by either making them incredibly small, hiding them in the html code of the page, or making them the same color as the page’s background.

Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing
When companies fill up their web page with as many keywords and meta tags as possible in a pathetic attempt to get better SE Ratings it’s called stuffing. Typically they are hidden, but many times they aren’t. Fortunately Google doesn’t view this as “quality content” and it won’t work.

Mirror Sites and Purchasing Expired Domain Names
Sure, those expired sites may have great page rankings, but by using multiple websites and using them as mirror sites, (or websites with the same content, but different URLs) and to create backlinks to your original site, you’re making yourself a likely candidate for dismissal and penalties.

Page Hijacking
This involves creating a duplicate site of an existing website which will ultimately redirect users to an unrelated website. This specific tactic is often used to download malware and spyware on to users’ computers once they have reached the hijackers website. Whether or not the real website is malicious, this tactic will still get you banned.

Scraper Sites
Otherwise known as “Made for Adsense” (MFA) sites. These websites use automated programs that steal and amalgamate various content from top ranking websites in order to create original looking content for themselves or a third party.

Spam of All Kinds
There’s a few kinds of spam that we’re talking about here. Most of these are blantently unethical, like comment spam or spam pages, but others like “wiki spam” were used commonly simply because the marketer didn’t know better.

Blog Spam (Splogs) are essentially “link farms” (a colony of web pages that all reference each other) and are created for the sole purpose of spamming other blogs and driving traffic to either their own website or another “main” website that the spammer owns. They can do this by placing links, keywords and hyperlinked text on random blog sites. It is often a source of comment spam.

Comment Spam is when a company posts comments in the blog, forum, wiki page, guestbook or articles section of a high-ranking website in order to improve their own standings on a search engine. They are usually obvious to anyone to sees them. They may or may not be relevant to the discussion, they usually contain some kind of link or information that leads the reader back to the spammer’s website, and they are chock full of keywords making it even more conspicuous.

Spamdexing or Referrer Log Spam. This works on the basis that when a web surfer accesses one website through a link on another website, the website that originally “referred” the link is entered into a referrer log. This is essentially a list of websites that have referred people to that site and is usually displayed publicly on a special “links” page. Sometimes the referrer will employ the use of software to automatically and arbitrarily access a large amount of websites over and over again creating numerous amount of backlinks through these referrer index logs thus improving their page rank.

Wiki Spam. Wikipedia started using “nofollow” values in their html code back in 2005 because of this black hat tactic. It’s when website owners/managers use the open edit capabilities of wiki pages in order to backlink to their own website. While users can still follow these links, they will not affect the website’s rank on Google since Google’s algorithm is designed to ignore “nofollow” links.

Final Word on Black Hat SEO
About a year ago some major companies were caught using interns to do some Astroturfing. (I remember one company was Amazon’s Shelfari. I know there were some others but I can’t find a record of them anywhere.) They hired on interns, told the interns to post spammy blogs on other people’s sites and when they were caught, the companies basically told everyone that they knew nothing about it and blamed everything on the interns. Although these companies recovered in the Google rankings fairly quickly, their reputation with customers and blog owners remained bruised for a lot longer.

The general rule of thumb is to be careful and do your research. If you’re trying a new SEO method or your not sure about something ask someone who probably does know. Hiring a professional SEO/SEM company is always a good idea - just make sure they have a “No Black Hat” policy. If you do find yourself banned or penalized by a search engine, don’t panic. Banishment isn’t necessarily final and neither is falling in rank. Contact the search engine and find out why then work with them to correct the problem. You’ll usually find that they’re pretty reasonable. They know that most SEO/M managers don’t do these things on purpose and don’t want to be tagged as a Spammer or Black Hatter. Unless of course, they were going to change careers anyway.

Popularity: 41%