Confectionary Companies List

Confectionary Companies List

Still not launched

Whats the status?

in reference to: Search for “http%3A%2F%2Fabout.skype.com%2F2009%2F03%2Fskype_coming_to_blackberry_sma.html” - Technorati (view on Google Sidewiki)

Fake or True

Any Ideas?

in reference to: Unable to attract even a single girl, frustrated man sues Axe | Faking News (view on Google Sidewiki)

Rand Fishkin Interview - Social Media Marketing And Viral Marketing

Rand Fishkin is a popular speaker at search engine optimization conferences – not so much for his trademark yellow sneakers – but for his direct and uncompromising advocacy of social media marketing. His strategy is to focus on the ‘linkerati’, the new breed of bloggers whose approval is often the first stage in launching a successful campaign, and he insists the quickest way to kill a viral campaign is by giving it to your public relations department. Fishkin explains his approach and gives top tips on social media marketing.

Key points

• Viral content can present itself in a variety of media - a blog post, a video, a diagram, a photograph or an article. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.
• Tap into the 'linkerati', a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content. This could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it; or voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg. They could also email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.
• Intelligent search campaigns use keywords appropriately in the link text, headlines, tags and the viral content itself i.e. blog post, podcast and video caption.
• Don't let your PR department kill your story. Compelling content can be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because of an over zealous use of communications guidelines.

Many marketers smile wryly at the thought of bygone days when innovative direct marketing consisted of women arranging Tupperware parties in their local neighborhoods - but for Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org), this is where the first brick of Social Media Marketing was laid.

Fishkin, who has quickly become an industry leader thanks to an award-winning SEO blog, says the widespread popularity and the ease with which Social Media Marketing (SMM) performs is relatively new, but that the practice itself is "just an expansion of something like Tupperware parties in the 1950s."

He goes on to explain, "People were getting together in a real space instead of an online space to share things, so that’s the first instance that I can think of of SMM - but I’m sure it happened before that."

If a marketer successfully executes an SMM campaign it can go viral, meaning it will spread rapidly across the internet through social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo etc, where your brand will get maximum exposure.

Fishkin pauses for a moment and then somewhere in his brain he extracts a comparison that really tops it - Picasso was the first viral marketer!

"If you're an art lover I’m sure you would say Picasso was doing viral marketing in the Paris Salons by having one piece shown which would make an impact, thereby leading people to want more. In essence you are doing the same thing - viral content - or in this case a painting, is being put out there where your peers are, where everyone is collecting, and you know people are going to be paying attention to what's produced.

"The principle is old but the medium is what makes it possible for companies large and small to engage in it." Within just a few minutes of talking to Fishkin it’s easy to see why he is so successful. His company has attracted considerable attention from the likes of the Washington Post, Newsweek and USA Today. He’s also a regular on the SEO conference circuit where he dons his trademark bright yellow sneakers. He says this is because ‘techies’ never remember faces, so when he’s in town, you only have to remember his shoes.

SEOmoz is a consultancy firm offering internet marketing and search engine optimization services. Their goal, they say, is to educate clients so that “they can best leverage the unique reach of the internet.”

Fishkin thinks it’s time to take a leaf out of Picasso’s book and go viral. By establishing good content for your product, viral marketing campaigns offer a solution to companies who want to stand out from the crowd.

Fishkin says: “Viral content when it comes to web marketing could be a blog post, a video, a diagram, an article, a photograph - any number of different mediums can be used to convey viral content. What is important is that it is easy to spread and that it attracts the right type of audience.” Fishkin has dubbed this audience the “linkorati’, a community who have the maximum potential to spread your content.

“They are very good at taking content they enjoy and spreading it throughout the internet - that could be through posting about it on a forum, writing a blog or linking to it, voting for it on Reddit, Del.icio.us, or Digg; or they could email it to their friends or text message it through Twitter.”

Although Fishkin and his team brainstorm ideas for viral content and create what they feel is a good package, he admits they have to "strike out" a few times before they meet success.

"With our clients, our process has always been to guarantee that we will get three stories popular over the next three months. If we blog something and it doesn’t work we try again until we get a success."

Fishkin’s advice on how to avoid a catastrophic campaign is controversial - he says businesses should bypass their Public Relations Departments.

"Every time you give your PR department content to edit, I promise you the content will not go viral - your PR department will rip the soul out of it.

"That’s a big problem for a lot of large companies. They have processes they need to go through, and anything that goes on the website has to go through PR and content quality checks - those things can ruin what would have been an incredibly insightful, cool piece of data. Something really compelling will be turned into something that looks and sounds like everything else because a PR department got their hands on it."

Good examples of viral marketing campaigns, in Fishkin’s eyes, have been video game producers World of Warcraft and technology giants, Apple.

World of Warcraft launched an international campaign where they produced video advertisements where actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Verne Troyer (Mini Me from Austin Powers films) talked about the characters they played in the game. "They have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube for their videos, so you’re talking about reaching millions of people through the natural spread of this content," says Fishkin.

Apple’s advert where two men acting as a PC and a Mac talking back and forth is, to Fishkin, "a perfect example where the content is created for advertising and becomes a viral campaign with social media around it."

This emerging style of campaign has presented modern-day marketers and advertisers with a real challenge. It is no longer necessary nor viable to sit in boardrooms discussing what the ad’s jingle should sound like or how to communicate the product‘s benefits.

Fishkin says that in the last five years we have entered into "a very different scenario" where marketers need to think about applying content which is going to "spread the brand further and wider than what we paid for in advertising".

Companies don’t have to go down the route of Apple or World of Warcraft with online videos; as Fishkin has already pointed out, blogging is a great way to create viral content. He sites Guy Kawasaki, John Chow and Techcrunch as sources of viral content, but even outside these more obvious realms, Fishkin says he has recently seen blogs on scrapbooking go viral.

Adopting viral content and SMM within traditional marketing approaches is fast becoming a necessity for businesses. Fishkin says it is a "low investment, high return package" but provides a caveat - it needs a knowledgeable person at the helm.

"The only way this works is with someone who is intimately familiar with the blogosphere, has considerable experience promoting content and can see what works, so that they will be able to predict success.

"In saying that, hundreds of unpredictable stories, videos and pieces of work go viral every week. It’s a hard thing to predict but from a business viewpoint it’s something you must try to engage in," Fishkin adds.

Tips from Rand Fishkin on social media marketing and how to make content go viral

• Research. Find out who in your industry has had success in this area, and of course who has failed. How have they made it work? Talk to your peers to find how they went about launching viral content and discuss it with marketing professionals who have experience.
• Brainstorm. Getting ideas together at this stage will be a lot easier because you already know what works. Pick some of the best ideas, execute them and show them to a sample audience such as a group of friends, or people you think can be critical of you.
• The Big Push. If your audience is ready to spread it then you have to come up with a strategy that will push the content out. This can be done by emailing bloggers, submitting it on social media sites, talking about it on your own blog, posting a Twitter on it, emailing influential friends. If you can take a campaign wide once or twice, the next time you produce something you won’t have to push it as hard because the audience already recognizes you. It will spread naturally.
• Only kill content if you are getting negative feedback or a lot of criticism. Not all publicity is good publicity. You don’t want to become an online laughing stock.
• Even if nothing is happening, leave it out there. Sometimes a year later it will go popular for no particular reason. That’s the great thing about the web - you can put something out there, think it has failed, and a few months later it turns out to be a big hit. It can be down to bad timing, or the right person not seeing it first time round.
• Keyword Research. One of the things we (SEOmoz) always advise our clients is to execute their campaigns intelligently from a search perspective. The links they provide must have the right keywords, and the same thing has to be said when they're optimizing their viral content - such as videos, pod casts, blogs etc.
• Make sure that it’s easy to link to your URL, that you have a link to it, share this, here’s a banner, here’s a badge - ie a piece of content you can talk about. It has to be easy to share and easy to spread.

Make sure the content is kept on your website so that people are linking to your site rather than going to YouTube for videos. Do this to make sure you are earning all the link benefit.

About Rand Fishkin

Rand first became involved with the World Wide Web in 1993 while still in high school, and eventually became a consultant on website usability for small businesses in Seattle.

In 2002 he ventured into the field of search marketing and was soon posting reports, data, and tools in a subfolder that eventually became seomoz.org. Rand is now at the helm of what is arguably one of the most influential search marketing companies in the world, which has also led him to become a highly sought after conference speaker.

Successful Online PR

Successful Online Public Relations With Greg Jarboe by Rachelle Money, 8 April 2009

How do you generate great online PR? How can keyword research benefit an online PR campaign and what are the things people should avoid? These are just some of the questions we put to Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization and online public relations firm. Greg has written numerous articles for Search Engine Watch and has contributed to Wordtracker's newsletter too, so who better to tell us how online PR really works?

Key points

• Schmoozing hasn't gone out of fashion just because PR moved online. Build your relationships with a wider audience including bloggers, journalists (on and offline) as well as editors.
• Learn the language. Don't assume a blogger isn't a journalist and make sure the terms you use are familiar to them and easy to understand.
• Think about how you produce a visual image to accompany your press release, such as a JPEG image or a video.

We jumped straight in and asked Greg, "if someone has a product or service they want to launch, how do they go about starting some online PR around that?" He kindly gave us his step-by-step guide on how the experts do it.

"We do our keyword research first. By knowing what the relevant search terms are for the product, company, or announcement we can find out what articles have been published around these search terms. We then do some searches in Google News and find out who has written about those topics in the last 30 days.

"All of a sudden you will see who your targets are. You should read those articles because if you can say, "hey I see you wrote this article a couple of weeks ago", it gives you a good starting point with that journalist, and you also get an idea of what their viewpoint is on issues. When I reach out I have some background information because of that research.

"I'd also say that people shouldn't be put off by the location of that publication. Just because a newsletter is published in Australia doesn't mean you can't contact that journalist. Content is distributed globally so it's more important to think about whether they are written in English or not. There are lots of English language publications and websites in India, for example, that are not on your competitors' list of contacts - and provides you with an opportunity.

"Then you should come up with a shortlist of appropriate journalists and contact 20. If two of them get back to you, you have had a good day.

"One of the things we keep discovering again and again is that when you have a conversation about the story, more often than not the blogger or journalist will ask, "do you have a jpeg or video?" If we can tell a journalist that we have a graphic element to a story it seems like it's more likely to be published."

Rachelle Money: What if my product or service doesn't fit into the news story mould?

Greg Jarboe: We've found the more successful campaigns that we've been involved with recently have been in sharing tips.

We got an article from the editor of Parents Magazine about the top seven dos and don'ts of taking a photograph of your child for a competition. That information was gobbled up by bloggers because it was like sharing the secrets of success - Parents Magazine was holding a contest in November 2008 where the winning photograph of a child aged six months to six years would be featured on the cover of the magazine. We know that they had 4,000 entries before they brought us in and six weeks later they ended up with 88,000.

Rachelle: How important is keyword research to online PR?

Greg: Keyword research shapes our strategy. It's really hard to have an effective strategy if you haven't done your keyword research first. You can get caught up in the “here's what I want to say” regardless of whether they want to hear it. Keyword research tells you what people are interested in and the language they're using. Sometimes that actually causes conflict.

Rachelle: Keyword conflict?

Greg: We did some work with Consumer Report Magazine and they have a test track where they test out cars and then review them. They came to us with this review to turn into a press release and the cars they had reviewed were called Sports Coupés. I did some keyword research and found that no one was really searching for Sports Coupés and so they had just reviewed a car that no one was interested in. So I had to go back to them and ask them why they called it this and they said: "We've called it Sports Coupés since the 1930s." We changed the review from Sports Coupés to Sports Cars because then people will find the review when they search for the term.

Rachelle: Did you experience any resistance from your client when advised to change the keywords?

Greg: There was a little resistance because journalists are a bit resistant when it comes to PRs - even when those PRs are working for them. I was able to explain, because I am also a former editor and have worked for media companies, that the search terms were not some attempt to influence the interviewer. I don't care how they reviewed the cars, or what they said about them; what I was saying was that this is what your reader is interested in, and if you aren't interested in what your reader wants, then you should get out of journalism and start writing poetry. I won that one.

Rachelle: Have you ever lost an argument over keywords?

Greg: On another occasion with Consumer Report Magazine they wanted to have a holiday gift buying guide at Christmas. We did some keyword research and found that around December people were searching for things like Christmas gifts, Christmas presents, Hanukkah gifts and that kind of thing, but the magazine felt this wasn't politically correct and kept it as a holiday gift buying guide. They decided they wanted to be PC rather than to be found.

Rachelle: What's the most common mistake in online PR?

Greg: One is that everyone you talk to is a professional journalist. Some of them are, but some of them don't have the journalistic training to know what it means to publish under embargo or to have someone pitch an idea – there is a whole set of language associated with journalists that maybe a blogger won't know. A hard lesson is that you have to to learn the language.

Also, you can't assume that a blogger isn't a journalist. In the US about 35% of journalists have blogs and there's a lot of cross-over. So know who you are talking to and which language they speak.

Rachelle: What's the difference between offline and online PR?

Greg: One of the big differences is that offline PR is focused on print media that has the broadest reach, for example the national newspapers or the big magazines. It turns out that some of those national print publications do have a robust online presence, but not all of them do. In contrast there are some blogs and online-only publications that actually drive more traffic to a site than major newspapers' websites do.

Rachelle: Is offline PR less important nowadays?

Greg: A trend that's become clear here in the US and which is now visible in the UK is that newspapers are in big trouble. The Boston Globe is a major newspaper and ten years ago had 590 reporters working there; today it's more like 330. If you are focused only on what is happening offline and on the print media then you are only half as effective as you could be. If you follow that trend out you'd better shift your resources online or at some point update your CV and find yourself another occupation.

Rachelle: What makes good online PR?

Greg: In some respects the strategies still work from ten or 20 years ago – you just have to apply them online rather than offline. Strategies such as the traditional approach of building a strong relationship with a reporter; that's fundamental to public relations. You still need to do that, but you have to do it with a larger group of people; bloggers and online media outlets for instance.

Rachelle: Is it appropriate for an online PR person to approach a blogger or journalist on a social media site?

Greg: More often than not it isn't appropriate. Social media sites are personal and if I were invited to a party and I came around with samples of my product and started trying to sell things I wouldn't be too popular. We have therefore found that these sites are good places to get to know someone - but they're bad places to pitch stories.

When you enter a social media site I think you have to leave your agenda behind and meet people. I'd say that at another time and place you can go back with your PR hat on and say: "Hey, the other night you said this trend was an important one - well I have a story that you might be interested in as a result." You might want to socialize there but that doesn't mean you should do your business there.