Nick Garner

For your social media pleasure:

and another 10 great ‘decks’ on social

Happy social media employee!

Yes, I know there is a massive recession underway – so who on earth is hiring !?, but randomly I’ve been peripherally involved in helping a friend hire a new staffer to handle a social media role.

The main idea is to become a part of a community and from within, promote certain services. A problem is how to filter applicants, so you get it right 1st time. My experience is that its not qualifications, it’s time spent online, the innate nature of the person and their ability to ‘socialise’ very well online in a structured way.

Also for marketing,? since social media is about influence not buzz, its critical to find candidates who are natural influencers.

So I wrote this email to help out:

Questions you should ask

- Have you got a blog? or do you guest blog or write on any site? yes? whats the URL?
This shows that they like to give their opinions and share them online. It also shows they have some initiative, since it takes effort to set? up and run a blog. the popularity of their work obviously shows they can make themselves prominent online and that they like being at the centre of attention.

- Have you ever done any affiliate marketing i.e. got your own affiliate site?
If you don’t know what affiliate is see here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing.
Its not that likely they have done any, but if they have thats great. it shows genuine initiative and commercial awareness, which is important since ultimately they are an extension of your sales function. Its not terribly important whether its been a big success, just that they learnt from this and can apply their knowledge to the business.

- Do you understand SEO?
Trick question, since very few people do…and its a great opportunity for people to dig themselves into a hole.
If they do understand the principles, it will help your online marketing by another 30% or more.
People who do know it will talk about sites they have done and search rankings they have achieved. The more commercial and commonly used the phrase and the higher ranking the better.? So ‘car insurance’ is better than ‘under 18 car insurance kent’.
For a 101 guide to seo see here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page

- Do you hang out on forums? which ones? and how long have you been there? and how many posts have you done on these forums?
More is more…so more time spent, more forums and more posts? is all good. This shows the person can embed themselves within communities and become trusted. Building trust is core to all this social stuff.

- How many friends do you have on facebook? what groups are you a member of?
On facebook over 120 friends is good – 600 is very good and above is really working the system. This just show how much of an online socializer the person is. Lots of friends means they can build contacts easily.

- How many connections do you have on linkedin?
Same as facebook.

- Do you use twitter?
If they have over 600 followers then good, but great if the person has fewer following than followers. i.e. more follow this persons updates, then he or she follows. If they bang on about how awesome twitter is, then bad, since there is not a great deal of utility for marketing in twitter (yes it’s true!).

- What other social networking communities are you a member of?
In SEO there is sphinn which I do some stuff with. Do they hang out on any specialised communities and if they do, how prominent are they? more is more here.

- What is your ‘handle’
People usually have a handle like anddroid or whatever when hanging out on the forums. Type it into google and see how many times the handle comes up. If 1000′s of times then good.

Show me the money ???

I’ve been looking at ‘web 2.0′ sites and ideas surrounding how they can possibly make any money. This interesting project has loads of nice ideas and in late July some of these are going to get built!

Social Innovation Camp

Some of my thinking on this:

Just looking at this list: http://scotland.sicamp.org/?page_id=47

Nearly all of these ideas are based around exchanges, but as ever with this kind of thing its going to be critical mass that gets them off the ground.

So I reckon the basis of a great web 2.0 marketing architecture is:

- Site is of use to a niche group of the web searching public. You have to start niche since there is too much competition for anything mass market.

- Get mass decentralised participation (wiki’s) so it self generates. More is more whe you think about the long tail and the easy by which you can find stuff on teh most obscure subject.

- Organise your site so engines can get in and comprehensively index.? Search engines typically account for about 50-60% of a well built site’s free traffic and they are critical to the word of mouth effect on the internet.

- Make the content very ‘linkable’ so the engines and ‘connectors/mavens’ (bloggers etc) give these sites authority. Linkable is another word for socially acceptable on the internet. The more social standing you have, the more prominence you will gain.

- Make sure the meme behind the idea is very strong. If you can put it into 6 words, great! The simpler, the more useful, the greater chance it has of spreading

- Build the site so its in the self interest of the user to pass it on.? The clever thing hotmail, gmail, various IM’s, user reviews on Amazon, facebook apps, facebook, linkedin, any social network site has, is more people is more for me.

- Low barrier to participation, high barrier to exit. So its easy to get started with and hard to leave. Think web hosting, email accounts, photo upload sites facebook. In fact anything where you get a ton ov value, where you invest a lot of time, where its reall hassle to move on.

Then you have a good chance of reaching critical mass and thus making the site worthy of taking revenue as a middleman. Obviously people don’t readily pay for information, but if the site offers enough utility, then there is a space for charging:

- To advertise if the exposure is great enough, but craigslist shows us that there are only certain things that are chargable (cars, jobs, property) I think the caveat is that people will pay if they are sure they will get? a sale, otherwise they just go where the risk is lowest i.e. a free site

- To pay for the utility a site offers, like flickr pro. The catch is that you really have to offer something exceptional.

- If your informaiton can make individuals a profit, then its also chargable. Webmasterworld.com / expertsexchange? /ft.com / wallstjournal.

- When you reach critical mass and you are the only real choice…you can charge, but only enough to make users not go somewhere else / or where you stifle usage and so kill off the critical mass.

Since ad revenues have tanked and probably will continue to do so for a long time (or ever), there is no point in depending on ad revenue for income. Besides, until ads are really relevant, they just fall into the old school disruptive model of marketing. And thats really not web 2.0???

YouTube noise

The big headline is: for every minute passing, 20 hours of content is uploaded onto YouTube.

This means the odds of having a hit on youtube are slim… Why? Well lets assume the average video length is 2.5 minutes. That means as you watch your 2.5 minute video that you spend your marketing dollars on, another 1487 competing videos have been uploaded.

This is why I’m very sceptical about active ‘YouTube’ marketing, simply because the odds of getting above the noise is very low. I think its far better to wait for someone to break out above the noise and do a deal with them. Then at least you have a fighting chance of getting some prominence. Of course you cant change a video and add your message that has been a hit, but you can add commentary and links on the description of the video and you may end up there via video adsense.

All in all, I’m probably just going to use YouTube for its utility as a great way of playing video within a 3rd party site.

Interesting article on yahoo getting ‘social’ from Marketing Pilgrim. Essentially saying they missed the boat 1st time around with search and they are resolute about not missing this one.

As we know Yahoo is a far bigger spread of websites than one trick pony Google, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo connects their assets together effectively create a very powerful social infrastructure. How? I don’t really know yet. But I’m watching since I sense some BIG commercial opportunities here.

?

At the end I met an extremely bright chap – Nick Garner – from?Betfair?however his top tip of the evening was for us all was to read??Scientific Advertising??? perfect fodder for those wanting to develop the future of ?influence?.

We were at the ‘freeconomics’ sesison held by Chinwag – read more here, and I met Abigail Harrison, who struck me as very connected in with online PR in general. ?

BTW scientific advertsing is a great book and well worth the read!