Kirk Abraham

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• 10 Steps for Optimizing the Brand for Social Search | 08.03.2010

  

  Facebook recently overtook Yahoo as the second most visited site in the United States. And in doing so, Facebook along with other social networks set the stage for a confluence of social and search that fundamentally changes who we, as a society, discover and share information, and in turn, where our attention is directed and driven.

  
  Source: Mashable

  Make no mistake, attention is shifting away from traditional destination sites and instead, it is fixated on personalized attention dashboards that funnel social feeds, the activity and focus of social graphs into one clickable view. It is, for all intents and purposes, changing how we discover and share information. In fact, Nielsen observed that 20% of social consumers today, use social networks as their primary navigation hubs, relying on contacts and trending themes to point them in the right direction.

  For media properties and brands, optimization combined with targeted and enterprising social networking now plays an instrumental role in capturing the attention and essentially defining the action of our customers, peers, and the trust agents and authorities who influence them.

  Referral traffic is quickly migrating away from traditional search to social networks, and in some cases, at alarming rates.

  In November 2009, Compete observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35% of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6% from Google.  People Magazine receives 23% of its referrals from social networks and 11% from Google. And, CNN earns 11% of its referral traffic from social versus 9% from Google.

  Referrals from social networks will only continue to soar over time as we’re introduced to new information where our attention is focused and when our attention aperture is open to clicking through to new, socially-influenced content.

  

  If the socialization of search and commerce is driven by any one behavior, it is that of sharing. If it wasn’t worthy of conventional appreciation and recognition before, the share economy is now certainly worthy of contemplation and analysis. In the share economy, currency is defined by likes, links, retweets, updates, comments, shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, et al. And, its impact only grows as Social Media becomes pervasive.  This is why providing the necessary means for individuals to not only discover your content, but also readily share it across the social web is paramount to the survival of brands in the era of social search and also social media.

  

  In a recent article, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld reviewed the state of social sharing based on data provided by Gigya, which powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com, NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com and Reuters. In the study, it was revealed that almost one million items were shared over the Gigya network within 30 days. Facebook ranked at the top of social sharing, but Twitter wasn’t far behind.

  Distribution of shared items
  Facebook: 44%
  Twitter: 29%
  Yahoo: 18%
  MySpace: 9%

  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook alone counts over 5 billion pieces of content shared within its network each and every week.

  According to AddThis, a sharing network installed on more than 600,000 Websites, Facebook also ranked on top, but email ranked second, with print, yes print, and Twitter placing in third and fourth respectively.

  Top 10 Services, Overall
  Facebook: 33%
  Email: 13%
  Print: 9%
  Twitter: 9%
  Favorites: 8%
  Google: 6%
  MySpace: 6%
  Digg: 3%
  Live: 3%
  Delicious: 3%

  At 400 million global users strong, and rapidly growing, Facebook is a mandatory content and engagement play for any brand and media property.

  In February 2010, Nielsen reported that Facebook users are averaging seven hours per month, up 10%, sharing and connecting within their social graph. If we used Compete’s numbers, Facebook would rank #2, just behind Google.

  

  Social Architecture is How We Connect and Define Experiences

  Gigya recently published a white paper that documents the shift to and the resulting importance of social search and its dependence on crowd participation.

  As a result of its research Gigya recognized that online businesses must optimize in order to earn referral traffic from social networks.

  With the advent of social feeds—a live stream of friends’ activity shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter— consumers can more easily rely on trusted personal relationships to determine what’s worthwhile to read, watch, play and buy online.

  Information is already socializing.

  The difference between our present and our future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence.

  Publishing content is no longer enough. Wiring search systems to deliver consumers who hunt for information in social networking to our existing static Web sites is outmoded. And, earning friends and followers is only as effective as our ability to return value to their feeds and online and ultimately, real world experiences. We are confusing our elementary steps towards digital and social significance with the illusion of progress.

  It is now our responsibility to create and connect meaningful content directly within the places where our audiences communicate with each other and also interact with the social objects that compel them to share and react.  In parallel, we must optimize that content to improve findability and also integrate the tools and services that simplify the process for sharing within the networks where people engage today and tomorrow.  By creating a connected social experience, we activate our content and community and empower a new genre of branded information catalysts.

  Everything begins with enhancing and optimizing connections and experiences for the social web. The key is to incite participation and sharing…on our site as well as across the most active social networks that are material to our business strategy.

  10 Steps for Optimizing the Brand for Social Search

  1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010

  2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search

  3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)

  4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for each and every network with cadence

  5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, Yahoo) – eradicate proprietary login systems

  6. Integrate social sharing functionality at the source of engagement – keep them on the page

  7. Enable the social syndication of that content within one step

  8. Manually introduce content and social objects to stakeholders and social beacons

  9. Create paths that define and engender the experience you desire with destinations and calls to action integrated to close the loop

  10. Monitor the activity and find ways to improve the experience and also sharing

  Bonus: Give them a voice to make sharing more personal and contextual

  The Future of Search and Business is Social

  Indeed, the future of search is social. Better said, the future of information discovery and dissemination is social, now powered by the very people who were once fed information as dictated by mainstream media and brands.

  The rapid evolution of search fuses traditional search algorithms and destinations with new formulas and services defining social graphs, social networks, semantic and real-time. As social becomes the axis for which all search is predicated, advanced SEO/SMO and a maturing human algorithm reinforced by the stature of one’s social capital will ultimately contribute to the hierarchy, placement, and findability of the content and social objects we share online.

  Google and Bing are already implementing sweeping changes in their algorithms and reported results to include activity from the social and real-time Web. It’s also the reason why Google rushed Google Buzz into the spotlight. Information and activity are now influenced by the greater collective of social contacts with whom we forge relationships and relations in each and every network where we engage.

  How does this information change your Web strategy for the year?

  Update: Don’t forget about email…

  Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
  —
  Please consider reading my brand new book, Engage!

  

  —
  Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

  
  —
  Image Credit: Shutterstock

  

• An Observation About Sales and Social Media | 07.03.2010

  If you connect with a company via social media, it’s likely to be someone in Marketing, or Customer Service. It might be an evangelist, or a community manager, or even the CEO. But when you then reach out to that company to explore some kind of business relationship–i.e., you want to spend money with them–you then don’t speak with that person. You speak with someone in sales–and all too often they don’t have the context, the connection or the relationship. These interactions are rarely as satisfying. This, it seems to me, highlights two important issues:

  1. Social Media engagement shouldn’t be constrained to any one departmental silo.

  and

  2. Your company is probably not ready for #1.

  Related Posts:

  • Social Media Engagement And Financial Success Are Both Trailing Variables
  • The Most Painful Social Media Metric
  • Dear Online Survey Providers: At Least Buy Me Dinner First!
  • Raising The Bar On Social Media Metrics
  • Social Media And The Theory Of The Firm

  An Observation About Sales and Social Media is a post from: BrandSavant. Copyright 2010, Tom Webster. Thanks for reading!

  

  

• Losing Andrew Carnegie | 07.03.2010

  Carnegie apparently said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors......Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."

  Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?

  Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual... that's king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

  It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

  
  

• Pulitzer Prizefighting | 06.03.2010

  People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame.

  It's precisely the wrong way to succeed.

  Lots of journalists take significant detours in their careers and their writing in order to win a Pulitzer. Maybe not to actually win one, but to be in that class, to have peers that have won one. Mystery novelists stick to the center of the road, because that's where the road is. Movies are written and released in order to win an Oscar. Once there's a category, a ranking, a place to battle for supremacy, we run for it. 

  Do you go to trade shows or enter markets or submit RFPs or push for a GPA or even gross ratings points because there's a list of winners or because it's what you actually want to do? Most bestseller lists and prizes measure popularity, not effectiveness.

  I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

  
  

• SuperTweet: Moving Beyond 140 Characters | 05.03.2010

  What's the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there.

  We've already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November, but Cascaad's SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates.

  Sponsor
  

  Cascaad has released its first beta of the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to "add smart contextual information and monetization [...], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores". The SuperTweet provides users with "an at-a-glance view of additional information about stories, things and places discussed in the message, without forcing them to leave your application," according to the API documentation.

  

  The API allows developers to parse a tweet, identify separate "entities" and then gather external contextual information on those entities. It then adds this information to the original tweet to create a "SuperTweet".

  If a tweet mentions Lady Gaga, for example, the name "Lady Gaga" becomes a link to a biography pulled from semantic-web database Freebase. Next to that, the SuperTweet gives an affiliate link to Amazon, where you can go buy Lady Gaga CDs. And if a link to an article about Lady Gaga is included in the tweet, the SuperTweet provides a thumbnail preview.

  In addition to wrapping these entities in contextual information, the SuperTweet API unwraps shortened URLs back into the original link so the user has an idea of what they're clicking on. And, although not yet available in this release, the Conversation API will put the tweet in the context of a conversation, providing access to other public messages in the same conversation thread.

  The challenging part of all of this is that the API needs to parse a rather variable piece of content - a user created tweet - and find the appropriate meta data. Just like a search engine, it needs to recognize misspelled words or other slight variations to find the proper content.

  One Twitter developer we spoke with said that, while they like the idea of outside information being added to the base tweet, they have found the contextual results to be hit or miss. It would seem that the concept is solid, but the execution is still in the difficult learning stages.

  While we like what we've seen of the SuperTweet so far, it will only be worthwhile if it can provide accurate results. If we tweet about the iPhone and it links to the Amazon page for the iPad, the service will fall flat on its face. Get this part right, though, and we're willing to be you're going to start seeing Super Tweets in some Twitter apps soon.

  Discuss
  
  

• On self determination | 05.03.2010

  I posted this eight years ago (!) but a reader asked for an encore.

  ...are we stuck in High School?

  I had two brushes with higher education this week.

  The first was at a speech I gave in New York. There were several Harvard Business School students there, invited because of their interest in marketing and exceptional promise (that's what I was told... I think they came because they had heard that Maury Rubin would make a great lunch!).

  Anyway, they asked for my advice in finding marketing jobs. When I shared my views (go to a small company, work for the CEO, get a job where you actually get to make mistakes and do something) one woman professed to agree with me, but then explained, "But those companies don't interview on campus."

  Those companies don't interview on campus. Hmmm. She has just spent $100,000 in cash and another $150,000 in opportunity cost to get an MBA, but...

  The second occurred today at Yale. As I drove through the amazingly beautiful campus, I passed the center for Asian Studies. It reminded me of my days as an undergrad (at a lesser school, natch), browsing through the catalog, realizing I could learn whatever I wanted. That not only could I take classes but I could start a business, organize a protest movement, live in a garret off campus, whatever. It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.

  Yet most of my classmates refused to choose. Instead, they treated college like an extension of high school. They took the most mainstream courses, did the minimum amount they needed to get an A, tried not to get into "trouble" with the professor or face the uncertainty of the unknowable. They were the ones who spent six hours a day in the library, reading their textbooks.

  The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

  Is this a metaphor? Sure. But it's a worthwhile one. You have more freedom at work than you think (hey, you're reading this on company time!) but most people do nothing with that freedom but try to get an A.

  Do you work with people who are still in high school? Job seekers only willing to interview with the folks who come on campus? Executives who are trying to make their boss happy above all else? It's pretty clear that the thing that's wrong with this system is high school, not the rest of the world.

  Cut class. Take a seminar on french literature. Interview off campus. Safe is risky.

  
  

• In The Know v1.09 | 05.03.2010

  Shared by EASTeam
  OK, some good info. But Please help me understand the context, ie, who is it that we have an ability to influence? Other Recruiters, HR pundits, our organization, our clients? Which are most important and why?

  
  In The Know v 1.09

  Five Links to expand your view of HR. Measurement and Games edition

  • Digital Influencer mapping: Who do you need to know online?
    Our digital influence mapping project uses Traackr, a Boston firm, looking to help HR harness online influece for sourcing, community development and referral projects. This article looks at a range of alternative sources and methods.
    “According to Flemming Madsen, founder of online research firm Onalytica, the main reason for measuring the influence of online voices is to find out the key people with which an organisation should be engaging. The key, he points out, is to ensure influence is not mistaken for popularity. ‘Popularity is a measure of how well known someone is,’ says Madsen. ‘Influence is a measure of their ability to move market share.’“
  • How HR Can Use Social Media
    Gautam Ghosh, an organizational development specialist in India is a social media pioneer who started blogging eight years ago. This slide share presentation is a marketing/education piece from his new company 2020 Social. Indian culture is, in some ways, much better suited to the use of social media as a way of getting things done. The fact that this startup is in Mumbai, working for Indian clients should shatter one or two of your stereotypes.
  • On Karma: Top-line Lessons on User Reputation Design
    Ultimately, reputation systems will emerge in enterprise settings. It’s where the battle for the heart of HR will be waged. Reputation systems will be the direct descendants of today’s primitive performance management tools. Keeping your eye on the emergence of reputation management and measurement tools will give you a head start. This article explains the idea of measuring ‘karma’, its uses and limitations.
  • Futures Thinking: Writing Scenarios
    Jamais Cascio, one of the real stars of the scenario development set, explains how to write a scenario. If you are following the Five Scenarios For The Future of Recruiting Project
    and want to know how to build your own. This is the best place to start.
  • Digital Business Tools Surpass the Web
    You’ll see this more and more. The web is over. The next generation of technology is coming fast and very few people see it. It doesn’t look like social technology. It looks like stuff built on the technology that carries social.
    “Social CRM is an emerging discipline that recognizes that the traditional two-way channel of communication between business and customer should include interactions among customers themselves. Numerous start ups including Bantam Live and established vendors such as Salesforce offer solutions to make that possible.”

  Bonus Links

  • JESS3 / The State of The Internet on Vimeo. Just watch it.
  • Design Outside The Box: Want to know the future? You’ll never believe what this one. Points for everything.
  

• Do Something Different With Your Recruiting Collateral... Please... | 04.03.2010

  But for the love of Lebron, please stop using the stock photos where everyone looks the same, happy and not like anyone you've ever seen at your company.

  Am I saying your employees aren't attractive?  No.  I'm saying your employees:

  --don't wear plastic smiles...

  --don't look like they just finished a GQ photo shoot, or

  --don't look like things are always going great at your company.

  Does anyone not know that those photos are total BS? Why is it that 99 out of 100 pieces of recruiting collateral are stale? A while back I wondered aloud if recruiting collateral featuring a nose pick was ever appropriate.  Call me sophomoric, but I'm simply trying to interrupt the pattern of played, vanilla, risk-free recruiting collateral. 

  I think the safe play is now the dumb play.  I think that if you use those stock photos, the best talent knows you're full of crap.  I think the way to get engagement on the recruiting trail with the best is to break away from the lame pack.

  Attached below - here is our latest play at DAXKO. We used real team members at DAXKO for the pics and went with a counter - "how not to get hired".  As a result, we made fun of the hipster alternative to the handshake (the pound), people who steal our free sodas and those that have the audacity to sneeze at the most inopportune times.  The piece is designed to be used at career fairs and is front and back (think the size of a door hanger), with the front playing out the theme and the back laying out the opportunities and how people can follow the DAXKO vibe online via the various social media sandboxes we play in.

  Feel free to carve it up in the comments. We learn from comments.  Hit us hard enough and we'll go back to the stock photos <sniffle>...

  

  

• Sr Applications Engineer ~ BSEE | 03.03.2010

  more about "Sr Applications Engineer ~ BSEE ", posted with vodpod

  
  

• Job Boards and Pizza Sauce | 03.03.2010

  What do job boards and pizza sauce have in common? I meditated on a video of a supposedly Jesus-like image in pizza sauce from a NEPA pizza shop and ended up with a global acronym. This is the kind of thing that happens when I take a day off work.

Link: http://www.engineeringsolutionsteam.com/