The two of you continue your conversation and after a while, the car salesman leaves the table.

That was a stupid scenario and would—hopefully—never happen in real life, but on Twitter, it happens all the fucking time. Car dealerships, affiliate marketers, online shops, those pesky “gurus”… They start following you after you’ve mentioned a keyword they’re targeting and they unfollow you once they realize you can’t be arsed to follow them back. The fact that the process is often automated makes it look completely stupid. After I reviewed the Audi A1 last year, an Audi dealership from Florida started following me on Twitter.

It’s good to monitor conversations that are related to your brand, your market or your niche, but please include a human being and human interaction in the process so you won’t look like a complete idiot.

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

• Reasons to participate in social business
• Internal considerations
• Debunking myths
• Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

1. Marketing
2. Reach & Community
3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

• Brand Management As covered in part 1 about Base-Lining, we already noticed that the social web is an excellent place for evaluating your brand. It gives you insight on the people’s knowledge and sentiment about you, plus it allows you to identify advocates as well as detractors. This gives you the opportunity to organize your marketing efforts around your findings. You can keep a close eye on what detractors are saying and respond appropriately, while driving people to the places where your brand’s advocates hang out. The latter can help you spread positive mentions to more people which will cause negative comments to be outweighed.
• Brand Awareness Through the information gathered in Part 1, you’re able to identify key platforms and tools to target prospective customers and generate targeted brand awareness.
• Reputation Building By having found the right people and the right channels, you can work to build trust and a reputation by showing your subject matter expertise. In addition, it is an opportunity to land PR opportunities in the form of interviews, videos and podcasts for instance.
• Search Engine Optimization Through the distributive nature of social media, you can generate links back to your websites or profiles when people mention your brand with a link. The effect of this will depend on the quality of the blogs/websites linking back to you (as judged by various search engines’ algorithms) but when you focus efforts on blogs/websites that have a high authority ranking and share a high degree of relevance to your brand.
• Connecting with Customers Social media offers you alternative ways to follow up with prospective customers. Say you meet someone at a conference and would like to follow up with that person. Instead of sending an email or calling that person, you could send a LinkedIn invitation and/or follow that person on Twitter. Aside from following up on the conference, these tools also allow you to get to know that person better. Once someone’s a customer, social media also offers great ways for you to stay top of mind with that person by providing high-value content from which they can directly benefit or from which you can up-sell or cross-sell at some point. Engaging with your customers on the topics they talk about give you new ways of opening up conversations that are valuable to both them and you. Finally, you can follow up on positive mentions by asking for referrals that generate more business for you.

If you have more great marketing-related reasons for getting into social business, let me hear them in the comments. Next week, we’ll look at reasons related to reach and community.

The Online Marketing Framework is my attempt at providing an overview of what the main disciplines are, how they relate to each other, which types of activities they consist of, and what they focus on achieving. The framework is not meant to be all-inclusive and I hope to have addressed the key aspects of online marketing with it, but I definitely welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

The Online Marketing Framework is built up as follows:

• Purpose First it looks at the purpose, i.e. what should the efforts focus on achieving?
• Activities Then it describes categories of activities that look to serve each purpose.
• Disciplines Finally, it positions the driving disciplines that incorporate the activities.

Purpose

The ultimate purpose for online marketing—for commercial organizations—is to stimulate sales. However, there are underlying purposes that collectively serve the end purpose of sales. These four purposes represent what organizations should focus their efforts on:

• Awareness This one’s obvious, you want to get the word out on your brand and product.
• Attention Whereas awareness is about people getting to know you, attention goes one step further. It’s about people actually paying attention to what you’re saying (about your product).
• Relevance This refers to offering people something that is of value to them. Whether it’s a need or a desire, it’s relevant in people’s context.
• Trust People can know you, listen to you and be interested in your product, but if they don’t trust you, it’s less likely to lead to a sale.

These four purposes are essential to online marketing and the image below establishes the foundation of the framework.

Activities

Numerous activities are at a marketer’s disposal but not all of them are equally suitable for the purposes described above. However, four types of activities can be identified that have a specific focus:

• Promotion This category focuses on awareness and attention by distributing messages to an audience or a community. Examples of activities are email marketing and banner advertising.
• Attraction Here, you’re focusing on awareness and relevance by positioning your brand or product to be visible when people are looking for it (or looking for something similar). Attraction consists of search engine marketing activities like paid search, contextual advertising and SEO.
• Content Here’s where you created well-targeted, relevant content that helps build authority and/or trust. Examples of content (platforms) are blogs, instruction video and ebooks.
• Influence This refers more to a process than a certain set of activities. It consists of the things that your market expects or appreciates from you. Whether it’s delivering on your promise, being nice or helping people with their problems, the process of establishing trust and gaining the attention of your audience/community helps you build influence.

The image below depicts the added activity sets within the framework so far:

Disciplines

Disciplines are basically the key pillars of the framework. The four disciplines I identified are:

• Push Marketing Sometimes also referred to as outbound marketing, this discipline consists of efforts that focus on establishing awareness, attention and relevance. This is done mostly through paid media, such as search engine advertising and display ads.
• Pull Marketing Also referred to as inbound marketing, the efforts in pull marketing focus on awareness, relevance and trust through a combination of earned media and owned media.
• Social Media The efforts of social media focus on generating relevance, attention and trust through also a combination of earned media and owned media. Social media can also create awareness, but that is more the result of the way social media works—i.e. people spreading the word about you—rather than the result of your efforts as a marketer.
• Branding This is the discipline where efforts focus on generating awareness, attention and trust. Branding is the process of establishing a reputation and promoting yourself through the brand you’ve built.

This is how these disciplines are positioned within the framework.

This is the full Online Marketing Framework:

The idea behind the Online Marketing Framework is that there’s no single solution. The individual disciplines and activities have their strengths (and weaknesses). There’s also overlap in the disciplines and activities because there are synergy effects. For example, clever content marketing on a blog can help SEO (attraction).

The various disciplines and related activities all need to be implemented to get the best results. It is up to marketers to find the mix that is appropriate for their brand, their organization, their product and their market.

These are obviously my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments!

Earlier this year, I experimented with a series of articles for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes on certain keywords, including my own name. I have to say that this experiment was wildly successful with highlights being:

• Ranking higher than a feature with a similar title on the New York Times website
• Increasing traffic up to 30-fold with a 30 day run-up

The key part of this experiment was to create content that will receive a decent number of inbound links (other sites linking to my website/article) which leads to better search engine rankings.

I’ve buried the experiment now, but I’ll share some of my findings with you here.

Topic

My topic of choice was the 2009 NFL Draft which was held in April. I counted down to the draft by writing a preview for each team during the 32 days before the draft. This gave me a nice temporary setting to experiment with as well as a run-up towards the draft so that my search engine rankings and traffic would peak during the draft days.

As a tip, I would focus on a topic that (1) enjoys great popularity; (2) is obscure and has a defined niche that will look for certain keywords; or (3) is a topic of interest that still requires (much) explanation/clarification.

Audience

I focused on football fans but tried to make it as accessible as possible. I used full names of coaches and players, and even appended positions to their names, e.g. HC Bill Belichick and QB Tom Brady. This helps fans of other teams read the references easier but still isn’t considered as low-level reading for more savvy fans.

The language was simple in the sense that it used the same terminology that fans were used to from other websites and television. I wanted to avoid “coach speak” since that’s complicated and obscure to quite a lot of people.

Finally, the tone was neutral. My articles were positioned as objective previews where each team received an equal amount of attention.

As a takeaway, I would recommend looking at other websites of the topic you’d like to write about. Choose website that rank high in search engines, since you might be competing with them in the long run. Take a close look at how their choice of language reflects the target audience and its knowledge/skill level.

Format

As mentioned, my format was that I wrote about one team every day in the 32 days leading up to the draft. Using this format, I was able to target each team separately instead of providing long articles that weren’t always interesting to every fan. As a result, it also allowed me to analyze which articles for which teams were most popular.

This was the best format for me to use, but it’s worth considering other formats for your topics/articles. Popular formats include how-to guides, top X lists and collections/aggregations of existing content. With such formats, it’s also possible to create (reciprocal) inbound links by linking to other content.

Quality

I spent quite some time examining the needs of every team, some more than others because I don’t always watch every team in action. The thoroughness of my research did reflect in my articles and also resulted in positive comments from readers.

In terms of article length, I aimed for concise articles that didn’t exceed 600 words per article.

Make sure that—regardless of length—your articles reflect both the scope and the thoroughness that you intend to portray. Position yourself as the reader of the content to determine the value and direction of your content.

Timing

I posted one articles each day from Monday to Sunday and in the afternoon in the US. I counted down in reverse order of the NFL Draft, i.e. starting with the Pittsburgh Steelers and finishing with the Detroit Lions. In general, I noticed that articles scored best when posted on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Obviously, timing was not the only variable that contributed to readership. Team popularity also played a role and as a result, I will make some changes to next year’s series. Options are to either only post during the week or to reshuffle the order and post the articles on the most popular teams between Tuesday and Thursday.

Your mileage may vary of course, depending on your topic and audience. I would definitely recommend looking into posting during the weekend. There’s significantly less new content released during the weekend. This might help your content to stand out.

Media

I didn’t use any images, video, audio or other supporting media for my articles. In retrospect, this may have been a big missed opportunity and I’ll definitely look into it for next year’s series.

Think about how media can enhance your content. Sometimes, they can replace part of the content or they can clarify the content better than just text.

Next Steps

I will do another series for the 2010 NFL Draft and will use the experience I gained this year to improve my content and reach even better results.

I hope this post will be useful and will help you create more effective content. If you have additional tips, let us know in the comments!

Photo credit: Brandon Robbins

• Title: This is the text that you see in the top bar of your browser and represents the title of the particular webpage you’re visiting. I tend to cringe whenever I see “Untitled Document” or “New Page” as the title because this is a missed opportunity. The title is the #1 ranking factor for Google and should contain at least your company/website name and keywords related to the page.
• Headings: Your content should be clear and easy to read and using headings is an easy way to separate the content. But headings also contribute to SEO, especially the H1 heading. If that contains relevant keywords, it will help improve your search rankings.
• URL: The webpage’s address (URL) is also a critical factor for SEO. I often see pages that have the URL www.yourwebsite.com/page1.html and this is a missed opportunity as well. By including relevant keywords in your URL is another step you can take to optimize your website for search engines.
• Meta Tags: There are two types of meta tags, meta description and meta keywords. The former is more important than the latter because the description is what appears under the page title in search results. Therefore, it is more important to have relevant keywords in the meta description than it is to include these keywords in the meta keywords.
• Relevance: I used the word “relevant” in relation to keywords because the relation between the keywords and the actual content is also an important search ranking factor. Using the keywords “Britney Spears” while your website is about refrigerators will NOT help your search rankings!

Look at your website critically and see where you can apply these quick wins to boost your search rankings.

White hat SEO refers to best practices that rely on quality to improve search rankings. White hat SEO is based on the premise that the quality of the content will naturally lead to high search rankings. It also encourages good design, which includes the clear use of titles, headings and tags. White hat SEO should not require the user to apply more tools/methods than there are available as standard and encourages users to make optimal use of those tools/methods.

Black hat SEO refers to “dirty” practices that often rely on quantity to improve search rankings. Black hat SEO tactics tend to consist of shortcuts that are able to boost a website’s search ranking quickly. A key search ranking factor is, for example, the number of back links, i.e. the number of websites that link back to your website. A typical black hat SEO tactic that makes use of this factor is to back links on “ghost sites” or “link farms”. Using an entire network of these back link-generating websites, the website’s number of back links is artificially inflated.

Black hat SEO tactics are frowned upon by search engines and generally result in major penalties, such as a lowered search ranking or even (temporary) removal from all search results.

Therefore, I discourage you to employ black hat tactics. If you’re working with a SEO consultant, make sure that s/he does not use black hat SEO tactics to boost your search rankings.

In part 2, I’ll be sharing some simple white hat SEO tips that will help you improve your search rankings.

Update: Here is Part 2