10 Social Media PR Lessons From #OITNB

Looking to connect, bond and create brand advocates? You might learn a social media lesson or 10 from the hashtag #OITNB.

The Netflix original television series, "Orange is the New Black", has more than its recent 12 Emmy nominations to brag about.

The show's social media team, fans and cast do a breakthrough job at publicizing the steamy side of women's prison and building relationships, engagements, interactions and advocacy that borderline's addiction – between the show, the characters, and audience.

Survey Says Social Media News Goes From Vice to Habit

Social media has become a powerful, effective, and cost-efficient news distribution network for organizations of all sizes.

In a recent TekGroup social media news survey; 37 percent of respondents confessed they are hooked on social media about 1 to 2 hours a day and are using tools habitually with almost 90 percent saying they use Twitter, Facebook, and blogs on a daily basis to follow and monitor a brand's news and information.

So as social media transitions from vice to habit and content marketing bubbles up as the next marketing drug, I mean strategy, of choice, what's the right prescription for your brand?

How Brands Like #OITNB Keep Fans Hooked Via Social

With the big push in content marketing and the use of social media as a commonplace tactic for brands, rising above the clutter is becoming a challenge, but with a little creativity, any size brand can steal some social media inspiration from shows like "Orange is the New Black".

"Multichannel storytelling talk is pretty commonplace these days, but finding great examples of brands doing this well can be tough to find because the reality is it's pretty hard to pull off," said Lisa Grimm, director of social and public relations for Space150.

"OITNB is among those doing a nice job extending its popular women's prison Netflix TV drama into digital with stellar content, distribution and conversation with its growing base of rabid fans," Grimm said.

Do you have to be a sexy TV show to pull off a magnetic social media campaign? Absolutely not. But it helps to have a quality product or service. Your social media marketing and public relations can't make up for holes in customer service, product fails and weak business models.

"OINTB is guilty of savvy social media marketing," said Kristi Kellogg, content writer at Bruce Clay Inc. "The evidence doesn't lie – one look at their Twitter feed proves the community managers are conspiring to engage their vast audience with photos, videos and memorable one-liners. Furthermore, OINTB is inciting rampant OINTB-related hashtag use and consorting with fans in branded Twitter chats (#AskOrange)."

10 Easy SMM Lessons From #OITNB1. Use Hashtags With Meaning, Power, Purpose

Twitter Cards: A Quick Start Guide

Everyone should know by now, the importance of creating multiple streams of internet traffic to ensure ongoing success. Relying strictly on Google organic traffic is both unwise and dangerous.

No one is immune from being negatively impacted by an algorithmic update, at any time. It is completely out of your control and if you aren't prepared for it, it can be devastating.

That's where social media comes in. Done correctly, it can drive tons of qualified traffic to your website.

Social media is more conversational than transactional, but smart retailers are finding ways to convert conversations into revenues. Twitter and Facebook are the undisputed leaders in the social space and should be the first place to look for opportunities. The challenge is in figuring out just how to stand out.

In the case of Twitter, one of the best ways is to use Twitter cards. Twitter cards allow people to view videos, pictures, and product information, without leaving the twitter feed. Instead of clicking a link, all of the information and content is displayed in the tweet. As more people use Twitter cards, they will have less impact, so now is the time to get started.

Using Twitter Cards for Business

As with any marketing tool, it's critical to have a plan for how Twitter cards will be used. Some of the most effective uses include:

Introducing new products: Because a picture can be included on the cards they are a great way to introduce new products and to generate excitement.Offering resources: Businesses often offer great resources for their customers on their website. The Twitter card can help direct people to these resources and build brand awareness.Using current events: Twitter cards can use popular events to help create a card that is passed along to others. Retweeting of business cards is a great way to spread information for a business.Sharing videos: If a business has a video that becomes popular, the Twitter card be shared and brand awareness will grow.Lead generation: A great way to capture email addresses.Types of Twitter Cards

The process to get Twitter cards is fairly simple, but before you get started, you will need to know the eight types of Twitter cards that businesses are using.

Summary Cards

17 Keys to Success in Social PPC

If you haven't jumped on the social PPC bandwagon yet, it's time you gave it some serious thought. While social PPC won't replace Google AdWords any time soon, it's become an effective source of incremental leads and sales for savvy businesses.

What follows are 17 keys to running successful social PPC campaigns. The first four apply to all social PPC, then we'll talk about keys to success for each major social PPC engine.

Social PPC Keys to Success1. Identify Your Target Audience

In search, the target audience is "anyone who searches using my keywords." In social, much more thought must be put into the people and personas you'd like to reach. Are they consumers? Business owners? Teenagers? What do they like to do? Where do they work, shop, play?

Defining your audience is critical to success in social PPC.

2. Identify the Marketing Challenge That Paid Social Solves

Think about why you want to use paid social in the first place. Are you active organically in social media, but need a larger or more engaged audience? Are you struggling to reach a B2B audience because consumers also search on your keywords? Do you need awareness of your product, service, or company?

All of these can be great reasons to use paid social – the key is to think about what problem social PPC will solve for you.

3. Define Your Paid Social Strategy and Objectives

If you've done the first two steps, this will be easy.

If your audience is B2B decision makers, and your objective is lead generation, then you'll want to define your strategy and objectives as such. If your goal is audience growth, build that in to your strategy.

Mapping strategy out ahead of time sets you up for good results.

4. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting

This is an overlooked and yet important part of social PPC setup.

It isn't unusual for advertisers to have multiple segments within their target audience. You might have different types of businesses that you want to reach, or you may be targeting both men and women, for example.

Look at your current social posts to see what audience they're intended to reach – and then set up your social PPC campaigns accordingly.

LinkedIn Keys to Success5. Carefully Identify Your Target Companies and Job Levels

LinkedIn's targeting optionsare great for targeting individuals at specific companies and job levels; it's especially effective for B2B. But think carefully about how you want to target.

Do you want narrow targeting with specific job titles and companies, or do you want to cast a wider net and focus on categories rather than specifics?

Be especially careful about seniority targeting. If you need to reach decision-makers, you'll probably want to exclude entry level people. But be aware that the higher level you target, the higher your minimum CPC will be.

6. Be Ready to Pay $5

5 Most Important Takeaways From the Link Building Survey 2014

by Jon Ball,July 29, 2014Comments

James Agate of Skyrocket SEO released the 2014 edition of his link building survey on Moz.

Big hat tip to Agate for his hard work in building the survey along with analyzing and releasing the results. If you haven't yet had a chance I'd strongly recommend you take the time to read the original post.

Agate has built the data into a visually pleasing infographic as well.

I want to add my own takeaways about the survey and data, and how it all reflects on the SEO industry.

Let's jump in.

The Interesting Data

3 Ways to Extend Your Products Into Social This Holiday

If you ask retail marketers where they will be sending their product feed this holiday season, nearly all of them will say Google Product Listings Ads (PLA). Many will list off comparison shopping engines (CSEs) like Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and The Find, or online marketplaces like Ebay, Amazon, and Sears.

Most retail marketers, however, won't list social shopping sites like Pinterest and Polyvore. Given those sites' increasing contribution to brand and product discovery, they represent a huge revenue opportunity for retailers this holiday season. In fact, Pinterest alone drives nearly 6 percent of social referral traffic, according to Shareaholic.

Many social sites already do accept retail product feeds through offerings such as Pinterest Rich Pins and Polyvore for Brands and Retailers. However as of this summer very few retailers are incorporating their feeds into these programs.

A recent study showed that only 1.7 percent of retail products merchandised in PLA were represented in social commerce on sites such as Pinterest, Polyvore, and Wanelo. Additionally, the study also highlighted that when product listings are incorporated into social, the content itself is often not updated to influence and engage a shopper that is in ‘discovery' mode.

There are a few reasons why there is a gap between the opportunity to merchandise in social sites and the adoption within retailers, outside of standard pre-holiday inertia towards the tried and true.

There is separation between brand and ecommerce teams, with brand teams typically owning social media and little to no budget allocated for testing social ecommerce.There is a definite lack of awareness of the expanding toolset available for ecommerce via social channels, both in terms of rich, informative, and sometimes promoted posts as well as in analytics.Retailers who have minimal resources dedicated toward social commerce find themselves in a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma since optimization resources won't be realized without a dedication to the effort.

There a few key things that retailers can do this holiday season to overcome the challenges listed above and incorporate their products more comprehensively into rapidly emerging social channels.

1. Recognize That Social is a Branding and Commerce Opportunity

These types of programs can be mutually beneficial to brand managers and performance marketers alike. Brand marketers want to make sure their presence and messages tell a story in social channels.

These programs, Rich Pins especially, allow for the addition of a commerce experience without the loss of branding value. This should help to break down organizational silos that prevent collaboration today.

2. Keep It Simple: Focus on Your Top Products Initially

It doesn't require a feed wizard or a robust feed management technology to make these programs work for you. At the very least, a retailer's top products should be in all oft-visited channels as consumers travel between discovery and shop modes.

Using sales data from PLA can help retailers find their most engaging products such that they can ensure those are represented in social programs. Additionally, the products that have been Pinned, saved, or liked in social already can enable better decisions on what products and messages to highlight in search and PLA campaigns.

3. Use Search Data to Drive Social Merchandising Decisions

From years of search query data, retailers can determine what colors, styles, and materials are driving traffic and sales. Armed with that knowledge, retailers will have a good sense of what to profile in product titles, descriptions, and images that they publish to social channels.

Summary

We're witnessing a huge change in consumer shopping behavior as many purchase decisions are now influenced by online peers in social shopping channels. As retailers are start to look for ways to incorporate their offerings into these sites in an authentic way, selecting the right products from feeds and highlighting their best qualities is a great way to start.

Maybe We Should Break Up With Google

Imagine you had a friend in a relationship with someone who was unreliable, secretive and made big decisions without regard to their well-being. Beyond that, the person in question is insensitive, self-absorbed and sometimes downright cruel.

You'd tell your friend to kick the loser to the curb and find someone who deserves them. You'd tell them they were better off on their own. You'd advise them to focus on making themselves better, instead of being subjugated by a significant other who doesn't appreciate them.

Well, Google is a bad boyfriend. And that's my advice.

Let's be honest, all of us in the making-money-online business have been in a polyamorous courtship with Google for a long time now. Look at the guy next to you in the search results, yup, he's your sister wife.

But like any relationship, if you're looking to the other party to define you, to bring quality to your existence, you're doomed to disappointment. Ranking well in Google should be an extension of the fact that you are the best at what you do.

The expectation of ranking should come as a result of a consistent effort toward being the most competitive, most relevant, most knowledgeable and most trustworthy competitor within your space. Chasing rankings instead of chasing those goals will only lead to a continually punishing, continually unfulfilling dysfunctional relationship with Google.

Love Your Rankings, Whatever They Are

Learn to let go of an obsession with perfect rankings. Try to imagine a world in which you didn't care whether Google thought you were hot.

We all ask ourselves the same questions; Does Google like me? Am I good enough? Am I as pretty as the girl next to me?

Maybe you are, maybe not. But it shouldn't matter whether Google thinks so.

When you look at your site, do you see the value? Real value. Try looking, not as you on the inside, but as an outsider, as an unbiased customer.

What about you means that you deserve to be one of 10 of the best of the best in all the world? There are only 10 spots on the front page, and that's growing fewer and fewer with local, shopping, images, etc.

The diversity of Google's search results pages adds its own opportunities for varied assets done well. Though making videos and getting added to Google News to share great content is a totally different endeavor than making them for the sake of trying to jump on a bandwagon.

Focus more on being ranked because you're the epitome of information in your niche. If you try to do it the other way around, you wind up coming off as inauthentic and it's desperate. It's like the chick macking on the bartender at last call. Don't be that girl.

Confident Sites are Always Attractive

If your business relies too heavily on organic search traffic from Google, maybe it's time to alleviate that dependence. That reliance takes a lot of power away from you and gives it to someone else.

Granted, there's always going to be an inequality of need between websites and search engines, but search engines don't and never have existed for the site-makers. They are and always have been for the site seekers. Sites that are built for the middle man, the search engine, and not for the site seeker are sort of missing the point.

It's one thing to want to have a smartly constructed, crawlable, well-structured, clearly defined website that makes it utterly clear to any crawler where the content is and what it is about. That is just good business. Like basic hygiene, and matching socks.

You also need to be aware of some of the trickier technical missteps, particularly larger websites and ecommerce sites. SEO is an essential undertaking, but it's about so much more than just trying to rank for one or two top phrases.

Caring about smart SEO is one thing, but obsessing over search engine traffic and rankings is another. The same way it's one thing to work out to stay healthy, but it's totally different to work out like a maniac to stay attractive to someone else. We'd call the former friend an "inspiration" and the latter, we'd coach for low self-esteem.

How are we any different Googling the same phrase every day just to make sure we haven't moved down even a spot? Being secure in your own worth means never having to worry if you're good enough.

There Are Other Visitor Fish in the Sea

In spite of how good the relationship can be with Google, when things are going well, it still isn't Google's job to make websites money. So let's consider for a second that we absolve Google of that responsibility. Instead we start to see rankings and traffic as a perk of the relationship, rather than the foundation of it.

If you have a site that is mindful of all of the technical and strategic necessities involved in good SEO, then the rest is just about being yourself and keeping your options open. People use search engines at such a great volume that it's absolutely possible to forget they use other means of web travel too.

There's no guarantee that taking the time to invest in a well-planned, meticulously executed social media campaign is going to get you all of the business a number one ranking will for any given keyword. In fact, it's unlikely. But it could certainly bring you an ROI on the project and it could raise your brand visibility, drive new visitors, turn former one-time visitors into returning customers, affect direct traffic and grow your listening audience for future efforts. And that's not too bad.

Some search queries are always going to be the Quarterback/School President/Debate Team Captain. They will be lusted after by everyone. But maybe try a drama kid, or a band geek, or the yearbook editor because they have something to offer too. And that's coming from a former drama kid, band geek, and yearbook-staffer.

You Can Still Be Friends!

We will never be entirely free of search engines, but that's OK. We love and we hate them for everything they do and don't do. For everything they were and for everything they could be. But maybe, just maybe they're not ready for the same kind of relationship we are.

Maybe we need to give each other some space to figure things out. In the meantime, we can work on ourselves and figure out who we are outside of a co-dependent romance with search engines. We'll always want the traffic and rankings from they can give, but it's time we tried something different, too.

Even though saying goodbye to a relationship of any kind can be hard, when you know it means moving on to something better, sometimes you have to do the hard thing. But don't worry, we'll still hang out with Google, we have a lot of mutual friends.

Google Still Shows Max Mosley S&M Party Pictures, So He Sues Again

Twitter is Blocked in Turkey, Google’s Public DNS Helps Users Regain AccessMarch 24, 2014Popular→ Blogger Fined for Top-Ranked Restaurant ReviewJuly 21, 2014→ Google Still Shows Max Mosley S&M Party Pictures, So He Sues AgainJuly 30, 2014→ Google Has Removed 100,000 Links, Approved More Than Half of 'Right to be Forgotten' RequestsJuly 25, 2014→ Danny Goodwin Leaves Search Engine Watch, Thank You & GoodbyeAugust  1, 2014→ Google Love Grows, Bing Satisfaction Drops Among U.S. Customers