When sharing an article by tweet, take a few extra minutes to find out the author and see if the author has a twitter account. If so, mention the author in the tweet. Instead of tweeting, “Great article: http://link.com” for example, you could tweet, “Great article by @author at http://link.com.” You could even send a personal tweet to the author letting him or her know you appreciated the writing.

Try to start conversations across platforms. If someone comments on your facebook page, respond on facebook and twitter, as well. After you respond via the original platform, tweet a message to the commenter like, “Hey, thanks for sharing your insight on our facebook page! Let me know if you have more questions.” This opens the line of communication.

Did you think something positive about a tweet? Say it. Tell a fellow twitter user you liked what they said, linked to, etc., via a tweet, of course. Who cares if you don’t know them. Wouldn’t you appreciate a stranger telling you he thought your joke was funny or that you had great advice? This is an easy way to start a conversation.

Retweet, but add your own personal thoughts. Retweeting is a compliment in and of itself. But you can add to the meaning of the compliment even more by mentioning why you are taking the time to retweet. If there’s room, tack on a “great advice!” or “great writing!” at the end.

Introduce yourself to people in a direct message or tweet rather than just following them. If you think someone is worth following, take a minute to tell them so directly. After you follow the person, direct a tweet his or her way that briefly says hello and introduces yourself. I bet you’ll get a response.

Sign-Up
Give visitors to you website a reason to sign-up for your newsletter, and tell them upfront what that reason is. Will they get a 15% discount, free shipping, a fabulous free e-book? Spell it out. Also, make sign-up as easy as possible. The quicker, the better. Don’t direct users to a long, painful form asking for a ton of personal information. What do you need to send an e-newsletter? A name and an email address.

(Image from Steve Krug’s book, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems“)

Content
First of all, put some effort into creating a thoughtful, interesting subject line to increase the chances of people actually opening your email. Think, “Hot Summer Deals!” vs. “May 2010 Update.” Your content, of course, depends on your goals, but the usual rules apply. You’ll need content that is relevant to your readers and timely. The point of an newsletter, is to be, well, news-worthy. Give them a resource that shares information they are not likely to find out about elsewhere. Finally, remember the 60/40 rule as a guideline. That is, keep shameless self-promotion below 40% of the entire newsletter content.

Design
The design should be clean, usable and aesthetic. Nielsen Norman Group found that users only spend 51 seconds reading a newsletter, on average, so make your newsletter can be scanned easily and that it effectively calls attention to what you intended. It wouldn’t hurt to test your newsletter out on a few friends. Have them talk aloud about what they notice and like/dislike about the newsletter as they read it for the first time.

Purpose
As with any endeavor, create a plan before you jump into creating your newsletter. Write out your goals. What do you want people to do after they read your newsletter? Do you want them to visit your website? Incorporate a call to action in your newsletter, if that is your purpose. Finally, consider using an email management system such as Constant Contact, which allows you to analyze clicks, open rates, etc. You can measure your success over time and see what needs improvement.

Good Qualities of a Social Media Manager

• Curious. The social media manager should be curious on a couple of levels. He or she should be curious about what’s going on in your industry, motivating him to seek out other blogs and people to connect with. He should also be curious enough to never settle for what he knows about social media, but to keep seeking new information and evolving with the genre.
• Thoughtful. The manager should not be a rash or volatile. Imagine an impulsive person potentially being confronted with negative reactions every day. You need someone who will be meditative on why a customer is commenting negatively, what can be done about the situation, and how his own actions and responses will affect the company in the long run.
• Social. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s a crucial quality. The social media manager needs to have an aptitude for technology, yes, but even more so, he needs an aptitude for people; he needs a genuine and natural interest in people and conversation. Even coming from behind a computer screen, insincerity will be obvious.
• Committed. A social media manager’s work is never done. The nature of social media demands immediacy, so a social media manager doesn’t necessarily work a 9-5 job. Even regular hours are exhausting, because social media accounts require constant upkeep and grooming.

Potential Draftees for the Job

These suggestions aren’t one-hit solutions. They’re just people likely to have a quality or two from the above list that may already be an asset. You would need to take into account individual characteristics, as well as your social media goals.

• Technical Communicators would probably naturally be interested in social media as a genre and cultural phenomenon, and they would make sure your business appears competent in communication.
• A Human Resources Specialist would be thoughtful and trained in how to handle catastrophes and how to respond calmly and sincerely to negativity.
• An In-House Search Engine Optimizer would be ideal if you are trying to increase SEO with your social media. However, some SEO’s are prone to lose the people aspect behind links and metrics.
• A Marketer or Public Relations Specialist would be able to see the big picture and would be strategic with social media plans.

No matter who takes on the job, it will be a challenge! Who else might be a good candidate?

First of all, you should go ahead and google yourself to get a standing of your web presence and image. Are you completely absent from the first page or two? If you are present, are the results depicting you favorably? If the results are less than optimal, follow these steps to increase the (positive) results for your name.

Sign up with the big-wig social media sites.
Popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have a lot of ranking power when it comes to search results. They are big sites, carry a lot of recognition (a.k.a. authority) with search engines, and are frequently visited. Creating a profile with these sites can help you rank for your name because of the high page rank of the sites themselves. Of course, this advice only matters if you use your full and real name when creating your profiles. “Cutiepie23” is not an effective Twitter user name if you are trying to increase your name visibility.

Create a site with your name in the URL.
This is the easiest and most sure fire way to rank for your name. Buy the domain name “YourName,” and put up your own site for it. If your name is already taken, be creative and think of a domain (not too cute) that still includes your name. If “joesmith.com” is taken, try “joesmithonline.com” or something related to your profession, such as “joesmithwrites.com.” You’re probably wondering what in the world your website would be about. Easy. Make it a portfolio. Make it an “about me” site and a résumé. Make it a blog with posts you wouldn’t mind the perspective searchers reading.

Create a Google profile.
Again, easy. Visit http://www.google.com/profiles and follow the instructions to set up your profile. Google now displays google profile results at the bottom of search engine results pages for name searches. When I googled my name, sure enough, my google profile showed at the bottom of the page, as shown below.

Get around.
Finally, get out there and try to spread—not smear—your name. You know you already read lots of blogs and have an opinion of those posts afterward. Share it with a comment on the post and a link back to you own site or blog. (Your name will automatically be hyperlinked if your provide your URL.) You could even try to guest post for a blog or two, and use the popularity of more well-known blogs to your advantage.

Other ideas? Questions? You know what to do.

Example: Best Buy's facebook landing page directs viewers to their website, presumably to drive sales.

2. Optimize your photo albums to showcase what’s important.
Facebook is about community and transparency. Instead of slapping a bunch of stock-like product photos in the photos section, put some thought into what message you want to send. If appropriate, create an album of people who make up the company and put some faces behind the brand. You could create a portfolio album of work if suitable. Be sure to add captions to the photos and name your albums something pertinent.

3. Give your fans a way to interact.
In other words, give them something to do. You could create a video box with relevant videos for them to watch. Ask your fans their opinions about relevant issues on your wall to get the comments rolling. Let them know you want to hear what they have to say. A great tactic is to create a contest of some sort for your fans.

Marshalls created a contest through their facebook page that gives fans the chance to win a $5000 wardrobe. You could create a contest for existing fans, also.

4. Take advantage of the Static FBML application.
The Facebook Markup Language (FBML) application basically allows you to create blank-slate boxes. You can then customize these boxes with your own content and your own label in the tab. You could create your own “About Us” page. You could just insert a big graphic advertisement. The door is open.

5. Try a facebook post tree.
A facebook post tree is just a structured content-posting schedule. Aside from talking to your fans, posting your insights and answering unique comments, a post tree could help you stay on track with making regular posts. What do your fans want to hear about? If you are a restaurant, the answer may be something along the lines of specials, coupons, etc. With a post tree, you just assign topics to days of the week. So my restaurant’s post tree may be:

• Monday: Weekly specials
• Tuesday: A special fan coupon offer
• and so on…

When it comes down to it, the way to really create a stellar facebook fan page is to know what your audience wants out of your facebook fan page. This takes a lot of thought and a little—maybe a lot—of trial and error. If something’s not working, try a different approach! And remember: the amount of effort you put into something is usually equal to the results you’ll yield.

Quality Site
Most importantly, for your site to be crawled and properly indexed, you need a site worthy of traffic. This means having a site with good usability, professional design and high-quality content. A site with good usability is easily crawled because it has clear navigation and organizational hierarchy, making subject matter easily assessed. Professional design conveys authority and trust, making viewers more likely to visit and backlink to your site. Finally, high-quality content will bring links and invite viewers to spend more time on your site.

How do you apply this knowledge to your own site? To start, here are some steps you should take in order to get the process rolling:

What You Can Do

1. Do some research and define your audience: What are potential users of your site most likely to search for?
2. Make your keywords prominent by putting them in important locations such as the title of your page.
3. Choose specific keywords relevant to your niche. Generic keywords invite competition SERPs. Choose one or two unique phrases to target per page on a new site.
4. Make your web address brief and descriptive. You can include keywords here, as well.
5. Write quality copy for your site. Search engines use lexical analysis to judge quality and rank pages, so hire a copy editor if you need to.
6. Include a site map that offers links to your site’s internal pages. Many sites, such as xml-sitemaps.com, offer this service for free.and provide step-by-step directions.
7. Make sure your designer can generate clean code. Invalid HTML and CSS, broken links and large file sizes negatively affect a site’s ability to be crawled.
8. Avoid designing with nested tables, which break up text and make it difficult for a page to be crawled. Sites created in the past year and later should include smart usage of CSS. Older sites relying on tables should consider upgrading their page layouts.

The Bottom Line
Even professional search engine optimizers are unaware of the exact procedure search engines use to rank pages. If all the secrets were released, the process could be cheated, rendering search engines less effective at returning relevant information. The bottom line is that high rankings come from high-quality pages with professional design and great content. Follow that mantra and you have taken the biggest step toward obtaining a high ranking.

Search engines use two major areas of assessment to produce search engine result pages (SERPs) most relevant to a specific search: document analysis and link analysis.

Document Analysis
Document analysis comprises several factors. The search engine crawls pages for keywords related to the search while taking both quantity and location into account. Keywords in more important places carry more weight. For example, a search engine assumes keywords in your domain name, title tag and H1 tags (headings) as more likely to convey subject matter than page content and captions. Search engines also surmise that pages with multiple instances of a keyword are more relevant to the query, the word or phrase entered in a search engine.

Actual page content is another factor that search engines are able to recognize and use to rank pages. Search engines use semantics and lexical analysis to “read” text and judge its quality. Other factors are also measured, such as how long a viewer spends on your page. How do you keep a viewer on your page longer? You can compel them to stay with unique, intelligent content.

Link Analysis
Search engines not only strive to produce relevant SERPs, but also quality SERPs, a process which is achieved through link analysis. Search engines assume that the more sites there are that link to your site (called backlinking), the more authoritative your site is. Popularity equals importance.

Search engines also “read” what the backlinking site says about your site. The anchor text (the actual text being linked) and the text directly surrounding the link are both considered. If the anchor text for the backlink is “this is a terrible site,” search engines take that text into account. Therefore, you wouldn’t want another site to link to yours with the anchor text “click here,” but something more relevant, such as your company name or descriptive keywords.

Links from any old site won’t do either. The more trusted or authoritative the site is that backlinks to your site, the more weight that backlink will carry. This being said, backlinks from poorly coded sites with inferior content can actually hurt your ranking. Link farms, sites that exist solely to house links for the purpose of influencing rank, are an example of this type of harmful spam. Sites that participate in link farms are penalized by search engines and given a lower ranking.

Tomorrow, I’ll complete the second post on this topic. There’s more to SEO than keywords and backlinks! Stay tuned.

—-

Continue reading SEO: A Basic Introduction (Part 2 of 2).

• Blogs (a company blog called the Whole Story, plus CEO John Mackey’s blog)
• Twitter accounts
• Facebook accounts
• YouTube channel
• E-newsletter
• On-site forums
• Podcasts
• Flickr
• Getsatisfaction.com
• iPhone application

No one can argue that Whole Foods hasn’t found their customers and created online spaces to respond to criticism, solve problems, and seek insight and suggestions. At first glance, it may seem as if Whole Foods has simply gotten involved in every possible avenue without purpose, but a quick look at their online presence shows otherwise. The company does a fantastic job of staying active, making regular posts with fresh content, and responding to customers’ concerns and conversation.

Whole Foods gets an A+ when it comes to following the guidelines that I’ve mentioned in previous posts:

1. They keep content relevant to their customers.
Whole Foods stresses the idea of “buying local”—buying fresh produce from local growers—as a key concept of their company values. It makes since, then, that they would encourage individual stores to create their own Facebook pages and twitter accounts, in order to stay relevant to local customers.

2. They find where their customers are interacting online and go to them.
All of the social media accounts listed above are active and current. It seems as though Whole Foods has found their customers and created spaces online for them to gather and talk.

3. Whole Foods lets go of the control.
With so many accounts in so many places, it’s impossible for Whole Foods to try to control its social media campaign with a top-down approach. Those who manage individual accounts are given freedom to add personality to the accounts, and therefore, increase authenticity.

4. They have goals in mind for using social media.
Each account seems to have a main specific purpose. Twitter, for example, is used for customer service because of its allowance for fast response time. The on-site forums are used as a place for customers to interact with each other, as opposed to interacting with the business itself.

5. Whole Foods lets the conversation take place without trying to stop or direct it.
When CEO John Mackey recently posted an opinionated blog entry regarding health care reform, he left the post open for comments. The conversation took place with both negative and positive responses, neither of which were edited. Whole Foods even opened a forum category on the issue.

Check out the presentation on Social Media at Whole Foods I put together showcasing the various social media platforms they currently use. I’d love to hear thoughts on what you think they are or aren’t doing well.

Did you ever stop to think that in the same way online conversations are happening about businesses, conversations could be taking place with yourself as the topic of interest? If you have an online presence—and chances are that you do—you have your own personal brand to manage. You have a responsibility to do what you can in order to present the image that you want people to see, because people are looking.

With this revelation in mind, I’ve compiled a list of tips for helping you market your online presence in a way that is consistent, authentic, and manageable.

1. Make a good first impression.
I’m not just speaking to those people in the job market. Would you run up to anyone you just met and toss them a photograph of yourself acting stupidly or give them an angry discourse on your political opinions? I hope not. That wouldn’t make a good first impression. Save these things for after you know someone and have a feel for them.

2. Show personality and be authentic.
Though you want to make a good first impression, don’t be phony. I’ve seen articles recommending that people craft entire profiles based solely on what may or may not impress others. If you meet someone or acquire a job based on these carefully-crafted personas, how long are you willing to hold up that sparkly structured image? Don’t mold your image or your message in a way that is not authentic to yourself. Your unique personality is the factor that will keep you from blending in.

3. Be consistent.
If your purpose is to become well-respected, well-known, or an authority in your field, create a consistent image of yourself throughout your various online platforms. Use the same picture on your blog, your facebook page, and your twitter account. Connect these disjointed spaces by using a similar design in order to stamp them with your own personal brand. Uniformity will create recognition.

4. Know your audience.
Before you try to please everyone (impossible), give some thought to your audience. To whom are you speaking? Direct your message to this group, and make sure it is meaningful to these people.

5. Go easy on the self-promotion.
Just as a company should refrain from using social media as a tool for mass-blasting marketing messages, so should you limit your own self-promotion. Give advice, share your expertise, and let others do the promoting for you. If you have a quality product, others will recommend you and endorse you, and these endorsements will carry much more weight coming from others.

I know there’s a whole school of thought out there that goes something like this: “I’m gonna be myself, and if people can’t deal with it, then that’s their problem!” and I think that’s fine. I feel a little bit of that myself. But just make sure you’re promoting the side of yourself that you won’t regret later.

1. Web CEO
Web CEO is my personal favorite SEO freebie. This is a comprehensive software with a relatively easy-to-use interface. Features include tools to analyze rank, competition, back links and analytics. I especially like the “keyword basket” feature that allows you to work across a project while easily managing your keywords. Many of the tools Web CEO offers are available as web-based tools that do not require any downloads, but if you are looking for a good hub to contain an entire project’s data, Web CEO is the best free tool available.

2. Google Analytics & Google Webmaster
Google Analytics provides really nice graphical presentations of data trends and patterns in easy-to-read charts. These charts are easily exported to a variety of document types that allow you to compare trends and analyze the effect of your efforts over time.

In exchange for giving Google open access to all of your site information, Google Webmaster will help you understand what problems Google may have crawling and indexing your site. You can also use Webmaster to see how users arrive at your site and to create site maps.

3. Firefox Firebug Extension
Firebug is an add on for the Firefox browser that allows you to inspect the HTML and CSS of a site right from the browser window. You can even edit the CSS or HTML in the Firebug window and watch as those changes take place in the browser, as if you had actually permanently made those changes from a web editor. With Firebug, you can easily see messy code that is unnecessary or being overridden. Clean code will, of course, help your SEO efforts, so Firebug is an essential tool to have tacked on to your Firefox browser. Firebug will also help you find errors on your pages and debug those errors. You can also analyze page load time and find out why your pages may be loading slowly. This is especially noteworthy, given that there has been some suggestion that page load time will become an increasingly important factor in Google’s ever-changing search algorithm.

4. SEOmoz Tools
Though you have to pay for a “pro” membership to use many of the tools SEOmoz offers, the freebies can be helpful for scratching the surface of a project and getting your head in the right place. I especially like the Term Target and Term Extractor tools, as they can provide you with a simple, down and dirty readout of what search engine bots may “see” when they crawl your page—which is most oftentimes different than what we think our pages are saying. The toolbar sounds like a good idea, but I wouldn’t bother unless you are willing to pay the ~$100 fee/month to become a pro member; most of the features of the free toolbar are grayed out, resulting in useless clutter at the top of your browser.

5. We Build Pages’ Tools
Similar to the Term Target and Term Extractor tools offered by SEOmoz, We Build Pages’ Spider Viewer and Keyword Density Analysis tools can provide you with a good starting place for an SEO project. The Spider Viewer lets you “see your site how the spider sees it.” I like how it takes all the HTML text from a page and lumps it into a big block of words. This can help you understand why you may be having trouble with certain words.

Know of some other great SEO freebies? Let me know what needs to be added to the list!