Oh yeah, hi! Dr. Brown asked me to ask you to check out all of these classes on x Train. We’ll share you all these latest Photoshop CS3 experiments with you plus I would like to mix in, just a bit of fun tale.
What? Go learn.
I’m Giovanni Gallucci and we are talking social media and specifically we’re talking about how social media can enhance your online marketing initiatives.
Now I just mentioned stumbling across a way. We're talking about social bookmarking and even as I prepare the outlines for these classes to search, to talk about social media. Some of the things that I'm talking about or are losing popularity and falling by the way side and other things are replacing them with specific platforms and you have other types of social media platforms that are being created that didn't have a competitor and they're creating their own space within the social media social networking channel.
One of those is a company called StumbleUpon. They have developed a system where you use a toolbar and as you surf the net as a user, you simply have a button on your toolbar with a thumbs up or thumbs down and if you like a website, you click the thumbs up. If you don't like the website, you click a thumbs down. Whenever you click onto those buttons, a window pops up from your browser and ask you why you do or don't like that website. You tell it, you click say and now, essentially you've created a social bookmarker within the social, within the StumbleUpon application which again is available in anybody on the Internet.
How that translates into traffic? Is that people who, other people who have that StumbleUpon toolbar, may be looking for recommendations for specific kinds of sites. So if you go across the web site for a Little League team for coaching Little League Baseball teams and you need tips and tricks in someone else's, you know, several people have been to that site and give a hide marks. When you go to StumbleUpon and look for a website that has that kind of content, that website’s going to float up to the top and may present it to you first.
Right now StumbleUpon is very young. There's a lot of areas within where there are practically no people when they're adding their website so there's no competition. I would recommend if you’re viewing this video on the summer, the fall of 2007, StumbleUpon is somewhere you want to be. You want to get on that platform, then search submitting your website to relevant areas within it and leaving good comments on it and then once you do your part, hopefully other people will be the same for you and your content will float to the top within that network and recommend other people to decide.
Let's head back over to our slide deck here. We talked about the basic description and we did a short demo of what social bookmarking is. It's, you know, for the most part, it’s a linking campaign that allows you to more control over the content and allows you to show other people in web what you think is cool.
The user's basic demographic, a lot of guys. It’s a lot of guys and technology. 75% of users that use a social bookmarking websites are males; over half, over more, involved an IT. So you see that target demographic but don't lose sight of the fact that the search engines are calling those websites and categorizing that content. So in this situation, looking at the demographic for the target user baser; really isn't relevant here because you get so much of value out of being called by the search engines and having more doorways to your website. I would say that the user base for this particular platform is irrelevant you.
Marketing opportunities, I just showed you one which is essentially back linking. It's also a place where you can go and introduce your brand or your website to other users, content distribution. If you're a company that has news to tell the world or issue and press releases quite a bit, bookmarking those press releases whether you put them on your corporate website or whether they're sitting on the press release distribution site. Bookmarking does just a fantastic way to get the word out to the world to tell people about your new press release.
You can go and find different social bookmarking sites by going to 301url.com/social-bookmarks. There's a whole list of different bookmarking sites. Theirs is one of the best list that I seen on the Internet and you'll also find within that same website, the 301url website and they place where you can pick up the code and the graphics for buttons for all these different social bookmarking websites from the perspective of being a content owner in your company, generating content on your own website and on the corporate, on your own corporate blog. It's imperative that you make it as easy as possible for others to also bookmark your content. So go to 301url.com, find the list of social bookmarking sites and again it’s just like the other stuff. Look for the target demographic; find the ones that are relevant to your business. There's a lot of general social bookmarking websites but there are also some that are geared towards this specific channels or verticals.
Now they get those buttons, get that coding and use them on your website so other people can bookmark your stuff too. Don't overdo it. ‘Hey let's do that,’ let's not overdo it. If there's one thing you’re going to learn from these classes, it's that we do all these stuff in a fairly conservative manner and we don't want to even go up to the social bookmarking sites and all of a sudden have a 150 links on del.icio.us where they didn't exist the day before.
The reason being is that you don't want the search engines to come in and see that one day you had two links on del.icio.us and the next day you had 540 because rightfully so, the algorithms will look at that and say, ‘hmm..I think that they are spamming this website.’ So you might get yourself penalized. Same thing that happen from the users. The users may say, all they see, all of that new activity and make a determination that you're abusing the system. Don't abuse the community. Don't abuse the platform. Depending upon how much content you're having your demographic, you know maybe you make a plan to bookmark five pages on ten different social bookmarking site today. That alone would be enough to keep you busy for an hour to an to an hour and a half to cutting and placing and moving through all those sites.
If you want a little bit of help with that, there are, I won't make any recommendations for specific applications but there are automated social bookmarking applications out there that you can do a search for on Google and utilized some of those tools but you've got to make sure that you don't overdo with those. You get some of those tools in your hands and it's very tempting to run out there and want to bookmark fifty pages from your web zone, 50 different social bookmarking sites. I’ll tell you now, I'd recommend against that because if you overdo it, someone's going to get upset whether it's a human being or whether it’s a computer program somewhere. And when you get yourself in hot water, it's very difficult to get yourself out of it from a search engine optimization standpoint on the web.
Lastly when we’re talking about opportunities with this stuff, you want to track what's going on. We're not going to talk in any detail about website analytics during this classes but when you're doing social bookmarking and a lot of these other things, you want to make sure that you have website analytic someplace where there will be clicked tracks are index tools or Google analytics or you know, media house something so that you can see where the traffic is coming from because this point in time, we talked about a lot of stuff. And if you're going to be out there, especially if you have a group of folks that can help with these initiatives and you've got people blogging, you've got people commenting on blogs, some people are, you know out there working in chat rooms some or you know participating in forums, you've got some people going out there doing social bookmarking. You want to be able to see what the result is of all that work and all that investment time and energy and money. So you want to make sure you look at your website analytics. Ignore all the paid traffic, anything that's PPC or CPC, things like that; ignore that traffic. You want to look at it a report within your website analytics that shows you organic traffic. Look at the top sites they're referring you and you want to pick out the websites that you've been communicating with that are generating much traffic for you and make sure you continue to nurture those relationships and nurture the communities that you are becoming a part of.
The communities in the websites that aren’t generating any traffic are very much traffic. You know give it a week; give it two weeks. If you're not getting a response, there are so much opportunity out there. I'd recommend after two weeks should be crazy not to drop that, I want to move to another one.
So watch your analytics. Look at what you’re doing. It's not rocket science, you can see where the traffic is coming from and keep the love going there. Where there's not coming traffic, dump it and move on to a new one, it's that simple.
That's all we've got. As far as this subject matter when we we’re talking about social bookmarking. Our last class here, our last chapter; for class two we're going to talk about. News aggregation and then we're going to move over to media and different types of media and social media and social networking. So come back, we'll talk about News aggregation and then we’ll hop over to images, video, audio, things like that. See you soon.
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