Social Media Strategies - News Aggregation Part 4

Social Media Strategies - News Aggregation Part 4 Here at xTrain, you can add and learning buddies. It’s so easy. Step one, click on your buddies’ profile. Step two, click the “add to friends” button. Step three, watch for an activation email and activate it. I have more that 50,000 friends on Myspace and I hope to get even more learning buddies. Oh, add me. I can be your learning buddy. Oh, yeah. I’m much better on xTrain than on the skateboard. Now finally we’re going to talk about the news aggregation, my name is Giovanni Galucci. We’re talking about social media and how you can use it as a platform for your marketing and online advertising initiatives. One of them is you got to get the word out as quickly as possible. Now, the shelf life of that you have on the new story save you some very rare cases. It’s typically about 12 to 24 hours. If you can’t generate enough gigs to get your story moving higher and higher within the recently posted news item and then trying to find to make its way over to the home page. If you can’t generate the momentum within the first 12 to 24 hours, the thing is pretty much can be dead or alive. I don’t why that rule is the way it is, I don’t know where it comes from. But I’ve seen it time and time again and I’ve also had other folks that work with the say the same things. Our experience tells us that you have a fairly short window in order to get this thing moving up to in the right direction to get in the homepage. So how we do that while some of used Twitter? If you are posting a blog post and you’re commitment to a medium to large sized company. You’ve got a group of folks there that have a, I wouldn’t say obligation, but you would say hopefully that they would champion the calls of trying to get the word out for you and helping you in promoting the company that’s helping pay their mortgage. So if you have a lot of folks internally out of company that uses the messaging in chat, you might send them notes that say “Hey, can you go and send them to the link to the Digg story and ask them if they can ask them to ask the other people around them to do the same thing”. How much does it take to get there? That’s an interesting question. Nobody knows but based upon experience what we’ve seen is that within that first 12 to 24 hours, if you can generate 80 to 120 diggs you have an extremely good chance to finding your way to the homepage. Some of the things that might prevent you from getting there is you’re making your way up to the homepage and being buried by several people within Digg. I have heard that in order to make to the homepage, employees at Digg have to manually approve the content before it moves there. So you may have something on your article that is deemed not appropriate or not good enough to be on the homepage by the internal Digg employees. There’s nothing you can do about that. But hard and fast rules that we’ve seen and experiences, you’ve got about 12 hours to get this done. You got to get as many votes or diggs as you possibly can. What’s the magic number? Nobody knows but it’s between 80 to 120. I've seen that if I can get close to 80 digs for every article. I’m going to at least make it to the homepage and then at that point in time it’s going to live or die on its own merit. Most articles if you don’t give them any help or any assistance, they don’t stand a chance to make it to the homepage. So you got to do at least give it a fighting chance. I’m going to refresh the page and see what’s happened. Anybody coming through for me? No, not yet. That’s embarrassing. That’s a let down. What time is it? You see, people are at work. They should be there doing this for me but they’re not. That’s very disappointing. Anyway, I’ll get over that tonight. I’m sure I’ll find a way to get to sleep. Let’s get back to what over to our deck here. Let’s cover the last slider too and finish up this class, finish up the chapter and then we can move on to the next area of social media optimization. Very quickly, this will be the fast to slide in the entire series users, people on the internet. The demographic is people on the internet and the reason being is that whether folks are looking at anyone of the four news aggregation sites that I mentioned or some other one, this is essentially news to reuse. They don’t know that they’re using a social media tour or social networking tool. So again just like I mention with blogs, give me a subject matter, give me an age range, give me a topic that you want to cover and I can point you to a news aggregation site that is going to suit your needs or at least an area within a site that’s going to suit your needs. Now, one of the opportunities here, again, I’ve showed one way that would just be a way to generate raw traffic to your site. And again it’s a branding tool, content distribution. If you got press releases, if you got blog posting, if you have internal employees that are writing articles for industry magazines or general magazines that have online access to them. Use this news aggregation sites to get the word out about the employer or the article or the blog posting or whatever you are putting out there. Same thing goes for the press releases. This also serves obviously as a bookmarking tool. Whenever you go and you add these pages to a news aggregation site, you have the exact same effect as you do with the social bookmarking site and people can find this stuff in the search engine that you’re going to crawl it. So you’re getting back when you do this. Some of the sites will give you no followings which means the search is no problem. Crawl them and you won’t get any love from them but some of them will take this also. You will get the benefit but across the board, if you got content on these sites. People very well are likely to follow those links so at least it’s another doorway to your site. The word of caution, if you start generating a lot of activity, it can quickly overwhelm your IT department to the extent that the example I used crashed the servers of the company that we did that for four times before the traffic died off So be prepared that if it works, that’s really going to work and frankly if you generate so much traffic and interest in something about your company that’s positive. And it crashes your server, that’s a problem I think most people would be willing to have. The last thing I'm going to mention is within these areas, it’s very easy to go for the long tail which means subjects that are going to be traffic or search very much on the internet but they can still deliver relevant traffic for you and a special act within news buying at some other sites. They have areas within those news aggregation sites that are specific to metropolitan, geographic areas or specific stage or specific cities. That kind of works into the long tail but if you got a local business that can be really effective for you to go and post stories in a local area because again since it’s going to generate a lot less traffic in the overall website you have a much higher chance of that showing up on the homepage for that category and staying there and the traffic at that point if it’s local used or there are people instead your local economy or your local market chances are they’re going to be more highly qualified for you. So that’s all I've got on text based social networking and social media. That obviously finishes up this first or the second class of the social networking and social media. Come back for the next class and we’re going to start jumping into some rich media and talk about how we can use those platforms to extend your brand and to extend your message. We’ll see you at the next class.