Marketing | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Tax Time and Weekend SMUG Class Readings

One of the nice simplifying factors about running a tuition-free online university is that you don’t need to fill out a request for 501(c)(3) status or other federal tax-related forms. With no revenue, the Internal Revenue Service isn’t interested in us. We can focus on our non-profit educational mission.

Alas, the IRS has not shown the same disinterest in my personal life, so in addition to attending some of my daughter’s basketball and volleyball games this weekend, I’ll also be doing this:

So while I’m meeting my obligations to the U.S. Treasury and the State of Minnesota, it’s a good opportunity for you to catch up on some SMUG homework and extra-credit readings:

First, here are the most recent SMUG class offerings, in the Podcasting track

Podcasting 101/Social Media 106: Introduction to Podcasting
Podcasting 102: Becoming a Podcaster
Podcasting 103: Creating Audio Files Takes Audacity
You also may want to check out the first episode of Chancellor Conversations, which will be one of the official SMUG podcasts.

During the past week your Chancellor was continuing his education (and hopefully helped some others with theirs) at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. Here are some of those highlights, and while they don’t involve direct homework assignments, you will find them helpful for your capstone project:

A couple of posts I did using Utterz (Driving While Blogging and my story of attending the Giants game).
Secrets of increasing web site traffic
How to use blogs to directly engage your customers (a great panel with Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines and Mike Moran from IBM) …and Mike’s keynote
My presentation on Facebook in Media Relations (I didn’t get to live-blog my co-presenters because we were using my laptop to drive the presentations, but Chuck Hester had a good story about using LinkedIn.
Robert Scoble’s keynote was an eye-opener for many members of the audience. (I’m still hoping to get some video clips uploaded after I have met my obligations to the Internal Revenue Service.)
The Blogger Relations panel was good, and it was especially interesting meeting Craig Newmark from Craigslist, whose service and business model has contributed so significantly to the economic disruptions faced by newspapers. (By the way, here’s another post about CBS’ response to challenging times.)
Sally Falkow and Brian Solis led a great discussion of Social Media Strategy, and Dr. Georg Kolb and Frank Shaw’s presentations on PR in Today’s New Marketing Milieu also were helpful.
Katie Paine’s Social Media Measurement presentation was a whirlwind, and I want to go through her slides in more detail.
Duncan Wardle from Disney Parks gave the second keynote, which gave a glimpse of how a big brand is using social media, and the opening keynote from Charlie Rose was presented in an unusual interview-style format.

I’ll also maybe let you know how long TurboTax took. Of course no self-respecting do-it-yourself on-line Chancellor would do anything but electronic filing. I’ve used TurboTax before (though usually not this close to the deadline), and I like how it carries forward my information from year to year. Hopefully its servers won’t be slammed by fellow procrastinators.

Secrets of Increasing Traffic to Your Corporate Website

I’m at the last session of Media Relations 2008 in San Francisco, attending a presentation by Brian Kaminski of iProspect, Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing and Dr. David Hulme, Vision Media.

Note: Lee did an excellent review of Mike Moran’s keynote from today. He also says he’s going to put his presentation on Slideshare, so I will link to it when it’s up.

Brian says:

Continue reading “Secrets of Increasing Traffic to Your Corporate Website”

Mike Moran Keynote

Our luncheon speaker is Mike Moran from IBM, author of Do it Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.

Mike opened with the great point that what we need to have the freedom to dip our toes into Social Media, and sip from a glass instead of drinking from the fire hose like Robert Scoble. We need to experiment and try things, becoming expert in what works for our employers and clients. Realize that most of what you do will fail, but that’s OK. Fail faster.

Now you can target even the smallest group. You can measure the results of everything you do. But the flip side is that you must change your message in response to what your customers Say (comments, blogs, product ratings) and Do (search, purchases, page views.)

It’s just as important to pay attention as it is to get attention.

Continue reading “Mike Moran Keynote”

Facebook Internet Marketing VooDoo Podcast

I had the pleasure last week of being interviewed by Paul Lewis of Mindcomet for his Internet Marketing VooDoo podcast. Generally we try to not have “VooDoo” and “Mayo Clinic” mentioned in the same breath, but I met Doug White and Tara Lamberson from MindComet at the Frost & Sullivan conference in Phoenix last month, and they invited me to be one of Paul’s guests.

The interview was posted today, and you can hear it here.

If you’re an Internet Marketing VooDoo listener who is visiting Social Media University, Global (SMUG) for the first time, I hope you’ll read about our school, perhaps starting with our Message from the Chancellor. You can audit a few classes before you enroll, so check out the curriculum. And the best thing is the tuition is free.

In my interview with Paul, I mentioned that Facebook groups can be a great way to create private spaces for interaction with key external stakeholders without giving them access behind your firewall into your corporate network. An example would be managing PR agencies in multiple countries.

Paul asked whether that might compromise the privacy of your PR information, putting it on Facebook before you release it, and so in response I said I was going to set up “The Hacker Challenge” to prove that data in secret groups are secure enough for most basic business uses.

You probably wouldn’t want to use a Facebook group to store launch codes for nuclear missiles, but I think they offer a good degree of security for most other applications.

I’ll be launching the hacker challenge later today, as part of the SMUG curriculum, so you can see for yourself.

Update: Here’s the transcript from the interview with Paul.

Facebook Page as White Pages Listing

Note: This is the required reading for Facebook 221, part of the Facebook major track for Social Media University, Global (SMUG). More information about SMUG and the homework assignments for this course are at the bottom of this post.

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I have written previously about Facebook Pages being like a free multi-media Yellow Pages listing.

I got my dead-tree phone directory analogy wrong.

In reality, with some relatively recent changes in how Facebook manages its URLs for Pages and people, and the fact that profiles and pages can now be found by Google searchers who aren’t Facebook members, a Facebook page can be a great White Pages listing.

Before Facebook launched its Pages program for organizations, I had recommended that organizations and businesses and other organizations should develop Facebook Groups. One of the key reasons was because anyone can form a group with any name, and if they mention your business name in their group description, people will find that group when they search for your business in Facebook. By creating a group and getting lots of members, your “official” group would come up highest in the Facebook search results.

But now, with Pages having been established as the way for organizations to have “official” Facebook presence, they are great tools for searching both inside Facebook and in the wider Web via Google. They’re much better than groups.

Here’s why:

Facebook groups cannot be found through Google.
Because of the URL structure, a Facebook page shows up high in the Google rankings when people search for your organization or business name.

A Facebook group has a nondescript URL, as is demonstrated by this group I formed in the pre-Pages days for Aase Wedding Photography and Video, a moonlighting business my brother and I have been exploring. Here’s the URL from that group:

Even if Facebook groups were available to be found by Google, their URLs aren’t optimized for search.

In Facebook Pages, on the other hand, the URLs have been search optimized. Here’s the URL for the Facebook Page I developed for our fledgling wedding photo and video business (click the graphic to view at full size):

But more importantly, look closely at the Google results (and the URLs in green) when you search for Aase wedding video

Note that my Facebook page shows up first in the Google results. It doesn’t show up high if you are searching for wedding video or wedding photography. Those categories are a lot more crowded (7.4 and 7.6 million), so it’s much harder to make the first page of Google, and I don’t have many inbound links to that page.

So that’s why I say a Facebook Page can be a great online equivalent of a White Pages listing. Your business or organization’s name is in the URL, which is major cue for Google. And maybe over time a Facebook page could become an effective Yellow Pages listing, if it attracts inbound links and if its content is optimized for relevant keywords.

Homework Assignments:

Go to Facebook and search for Mayo Clinic. Note how many groups you find, but also that the official Mayo Clinic Page shows up at the top of the search results.
Try the same Mayo Clinic search in Google. Note that the Facebook page doesn’t show up anywhere in the first several pages of results. For organizations that already have lots of web presence, a Facebook page will not immediately come up high in the Google rankings. But then again, people will be able to find contact information for those organizations through conventional Google results.
Search in Facebook for your business or organization. You’ll see how many groups have been formed that mention your organization. If an official Page doesn’t come up first, you may want to consider developing a page. And if someone not affiliated with your organization has created a Page for you, you can seek to have it removed. This will be covered in more detail in Facebook 310.

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