Blogging

The term “social media” encompasses several different types of sites, and it’s important to use all of them properly in order to really be effective at social media optimization (SMO). Blogs are of course one of the most common forms of social media, and there are significant benefits to having your own blog as well as building name recognition and credibility for your company through other industry blogs.

But what separates SMO from SEO is that search engine optimization is about owning a top spot in the search engines for your website on a specific term, while social media optimization is about owning the entire first page of the search engines for multiple sites that point back to you for a specific term. So, here are some tips for using different types of social media sites for SMO.

Discussion Forums

These are a place to showcase your expertise in a non-promotional way. For example, in an SEO forum, telling everyone how great your agency is at SEO is suicide; but displaying your knowledge by offering expert tips on title meta tag creation or non-spammy link building is brilliant.

Social Bookmarking

Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Searchles are great places to spread the word about your own thought leadership content as well as, and even more importantly, positive coverage your company gets from other bloggers, journalists or analysts. But to really drive serious traffic from these sites, you need to know how to play the game with “power users” and the community. You can find some great posts on capitalizing on social bookmarking sites on Social Media Today, and no one has written more great stuff about using Digg to drive traffic than Chris Lang.

Wikis

A wiki is another place to share your knowledge of a particular topic with a community or the world. You can do this by either writing an encyclopedic article about a topic; adding to or editing an existing article; or adding links to your own thought-leadership content as supporting material. Wikipedia is the best known but also the most difficult to work with; that leaves an opening for alternative wiki sites such as Google’s Knol, open-site.org, Freebase and others which are less contributor-hostile.

Video

Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island for the last four years, you know that online video is hot. YouTube now draws more than 70 million unique visitors per month. Business video production is growing exponentially because video is engaging, repurposable (for example, you can use a video on your website, at tradeshows and in presentations; post it on YouTube; use it as an asset for blogger outreach or a channel sales tool; add it to social media press releases; etc.), potentially viral, and increasingly searchable.

Two other quick points to note about business video:

• Creativity is more important than expense; think “big idea” before “big cost.”
• Paradoxially, the investment required is inverse to company size. A small company needs to be concerned with professional production values in order to be taken seriously; big companies are better served by informal, low-bidget videos that make them seem more human.

Social Networking

At the least, social networking services like LinkedIn, Facebook and Konnects provide increased exposure for your company (and your “personal brand”) while also providing SEO and reputation management benefits. At best, these sites can help you make valuable new business connections.

Using all of the tools of social media, ideally in an integrated fashion, maximizes your potential for exposure on key search terms among the widest possible audience. And it just may enable you to “own” the first page of the search engines for important long-tail search terms—SEO on steriods.

*****

Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

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Using ALL the Tools of Social Media Optimization

In March, Radar Networks launched Twine, an application that organizes information and connects people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, and photos. Along with Metaweb’s Freebase, Powerset (sold to Microsoft), Hakia, Reuter’s CaliasAdaptiveBlue and a few other startups, Radar Network is trying to crack the code on building a piece of the semantic Web.

In the Times Online article, Web creator Tim Berners-Lee gave an example of how the semantic Web would work:

“Imagine if two completely separate things–your bank statements and your calendar–spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.”

Twine won’t provide that futuristic capability but it attempts to build a “semantic graph” of relationships between content, tags, people and Twines (the collection of items of an individual or group on the service). Each piece of content is a “semantic object,” Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack said, using Twine’s underlying ontology and database, which applies semantic technologies such as RDF for storing data.

Spivack told me that public Twines are now visible to visitors to the site and to search engines. So far in the beta phase nearly 15,000 Twines have been created and 400,000 pieces of content have been added into the system. More than 50,000 users signed up for the service, spending 13 to 15 minutes per session on the site, he said.

A major new release of the Twine platform is slated for release in the fall to address shortcomings and introduce new features. “We have worked on a lot of simplification, reducing the clutter, and we still need to reduce more. Twine has a lot of powerful features nobody uses, so we are moving some of the advanced features out of the way,” Spivack said. “The Fall release will add bring more intelligence and semantics to the surface. For example, we will let anyone define a new type of thing, such as a recipe or baseball team form, to author. It’s more like what Freebase does, and we will also likely integrate with Freebase over time.”

In addition, performance improvements and algorithms to improve search as well as mining and crawling content are in the works. “A major focus of our work is on personalization and recommendations,” Spivack said. “Ultimately, Twine is about ‘interest networking’ and is a content distribution network. People declare their interests, add content, join Twines and connect with people. As users work with the system it learns about their interests, using artificial intelligence and semantic Web technologies to provide more relevance. We are not attempting to index the whole Web, just the best stuff of interest to users. Ninety-nine percent of what’s on the Web is not interesting to a user, so it’s more about high signal to noise.”

On the business front, Spivack believes that Twine can be an intermediary for users, delivering more targeted marketing messages in addition to content. It’s similar to the way Facebook is creating a new kind of environment for advertising based on knowing member interests and their social or semantic graph. “The goal for Twine is to be the place on the Web that best understands your interests and represents them to others. The key is to give users control and privacy,” Spivack said.

Twine is a work in progress. It’s ambitious and has the potential to demonstrate how a more semantic Web could benefit users. The biggest challenge will be scaling the back-end infrastructure and attracting users, which means Twine will have become far more easy to configure and use. We’ll see in the coming months whether the forthcoming changes to Twine help open the floodgates.

More:
Radar Networks readies new release of Twine

Semantic search tool Powerset has put out a new iPhone app this week. Those looking to search on the go can now use the service’s plain English searching capabilities to scour the entirety of Wikipedia and Freebase (coverage). The app comes after months of Powerset staff fumbling while trying to use their own product on the popular mobile device.

The new tool will pull up everything the desktop version does, although I found performance to be a tad slower–even over Wi-Fi. Outline, one of my favorite Powerset features that gives you quick links to each section in a Wikipedia article, has also made its way into the pocket version. While not as convenient as the desktop version which sits beside the actual Wikipedia article, it’s a great way to skip down to a lower section of an article, which is normally an activity that makes you look like a complete idiot while you continuously drag your finger up and down the screen of your phone. There’s also a much needed search function, something the iPhone’s version of Safari is lacking from its desktop sibling.

I expect the company to come out with its own native app that will save past searches and let you store local content depending on how popular this version becomes. I’ve embedded some screens below. Also embedded after the break is a demo video of it in action.

Powerset iPhone Web App Demo from officialpowerset on Vimeo

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Powerset’s iPhone app solves bar bets, makes you smarter

Here are some of the highlights from the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we covered announcements by Google about Gears and App Engine, we looked at some compelling Yahoo! Pipes apps, we checked out Strands Lifestreaming, and we reviewed promising Semantic Apps Faviki and Freebase. On the trends side we analyzed the contentious Semantic Search market, we looked at Google’s Android vs iPhone, we put the Social Networking battle between Google and Facebook in context, and we explored more social media trends.

Web Apps

Google Gears Turns One: Future is in Open Standards

Google Gears, the offline web application API it debuted last year at its developer conference, turned one this week. To celebrate, Google dropped the company name from Gears. The name change is a symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google’s commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

See also: Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access; Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List

Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our initial coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. We give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.

Strands Lifestreaming: What They’re Doing and Invites for Readers

Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company’s wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It’s a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review…

See also: Recommendation and RSS: A Look at Two Readers Filtering the Noise

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not – semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

Freebase, the first product of semantic web company Metaweb, is an open, semantically marked up database of information that we called one of the “10 semantic apps to watch” last year. With $57.4 million in funding, a smart team, and a tech legend in Danny Hillis at the helm, Metaweb is considered to be one of the most serious players in the Semantic Web space. Yet the company’s
efforts to date have been met with skepticism. Particularly, people have asked how is Freebase different to Wikipedia? Jamie Taylor, the Minister of Information at Metaweb, spoke at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose last week in an effort to dispel some of that skepticism.

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search.
Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest
to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results.
In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

See also: Making the Web Searchable: The Story of SearchMonkey

Android Is Out For iPhone Blood

Wednesday, at Google’s I/O Event, the company demonstrated their Android prototype phone, a device which has been greatly improved since its last public outing at this year’s CES and Mobile World conferences. Today, Android looks classy enough that you half-expected them to pull a Steve Jobs and announce that you could run out and buy it right now. During the demo, the company showed off some of the applications that will run on Android – like a Google Maps Street View app that drew cheers from the crowd. From the buzz surrounding the Google Phone at this event, it’s clear that Android has a shot at knocking that other touchscreen phone off its pedestal.

See also: Google’s Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone?

The Social Networking Arms Race

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google’s platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example — the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war.

See also: How Many Friends is Too Many?

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

Social networking is at a major fork in the road. Down one road is adding more features to a walled garden and opening up just enough, so that users seldom need to leave. Most sites are going down this yellow brick road and the prize is clearly a big one. But they may end up back in Kansas. Down the other road, lies a future of being the primary repository for your connections (aka the social graph), but with this data available via open APIs to anybody who needs it. That is a utility type model, and as with any utility, it can be hugely valuable at scale.

See also: Sometimes Crowds Aren’t That Wise

Who Are The “Digitally Savvy?”

A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that’s being called the “digitally savvy.” These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words – they’re us.

See also: When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Original post:
Weekly Wrapup, 26-30 May 2008

Within an astonishingly short time, Wikipedia has become one of the most-visited sites on the Internet. Consequently, Wikipedians—the self-appointed guardians of what is and isn’t permissible for inclusion on the site—have become very powerful in determining what you are permitted to know about any topic, and even which topics are worthy of inclusion. It’s been said that with great power comes great responsibility. That responsibility isn’t always handled properly.

For example, Wikipedia’s list of social networking websites now contains 111 entries; an impressive list, but certainly not all-inclusive. To the credit of Wikipedians, the list is now much better than it was just a few months ago, when it contained only 43 entries, but it is still behind the curve.

Then there is the matter of commercial content. While no one wants to see Wikipedia degenerate into a collection of marketing brochures, the site’s prohibition on commercial speech seems to be unclear and unevenly enforced. There are tens of thousands of small businesses with no presence on Wikipedia, yet Oracle (the database company) is listed, as are The Oracle (the shopping mall near London), as well as PeopleSoft, SAP, IBM, and many other corporate giants.

Finally, there is the accuracy of the content itself. To cite just one recent example, Debra Mastaler points out in her post Do You Link Dope or Incestuously Link? on The Link Spiel that Wikipedia’s page on link-building methods contains “terminology used to describe outdated , incomplete and irrelevant link methods.” She goes on to write that “And yet, when I publicly suggest knowledgeable people with good content should contribute to the Wikipedia, I’m spoken down to, told to read the conflict of interest guidelines and criticized.” Ouch. And Debra is by no means alone on this.

When frustration in the user community is combined with the opportunity for astronomical site traffic, competitors are bound to emerge. One such alternative is Freebase, which is still very immature (but does have its own Wikipedia page). Of no doubt more concern to the Wikipedians is Knol, Google’s still-in-beta entry into online reference. As Michael Estrin points out, “According to Hitwise, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google. While Knol and Wikipedia may not be direct competitors in terms of style, the two do appear to be on a collision course for top billing when it comes to web queries.” To put it more bluntly, Wikipedia gets high traffic because it gets great placement on Google searches; what do you suppose is going to happen to the site’s search engine position once Google has a competitive offering?

Despite its flaws, Wikipedia isn’t going to disappear. But the shine is off, and serious competitors are emerging. Through a combination of success and arrogance (over-zealous article rejection, the use of insidious “no follow” tags, condescension to contributors), the Wikipedians have brought this upon themselves.

*****

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Social Networking Sites and SEO: What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You