[originally appeared in Business Lexington]

Install Offsite Backups. Losing critical files from your computer can seriously damage your business and your customers’ confidence – and can even lead to lawsuits. When things are busy again, backups may get a lower priority so automating it now is a great idea.

Set up Local Business Profiles. Yahoo and Google Local profiles are used for their regional search engines. If you want to be able to show up properly next to competition on maps and city-wide searches, setting up your profile is critical.

Reserve Social Media Profiles. Sites like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon offer ways to grow online authority. But if your profile has been taken by someone else, it can be a big hassle.

Monitor Your Industry. Free tools such as Google Alerts and RSS make it incredibly easy to listen to the community and competition at a glance. If your industry has bloggers (most do) subscribe to the best and skim them daily.

Set Up Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Software. Customers love consistent service, but when things are busy, that can be a challenge. Web-based CRM tools are an affordable, simple way to organize requests, proposals, support calls and follow ups.

Create Reusable Templates For Customer Messages. If you send similar notes often, learn to use the template feature of most email programs. This lets you cut down the accumulation of time spent typing the same information again and again.  Setting

Update Your Website. Outdated corporate websites look unprofessional and often rate poorly in search engines. Check your site for correct content, broken links, and appearance on web browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Adding a FAQ can reduce service/support calls, and a map can help people find you without calling.  It could be that now’s the time to invest more time and energy into this critical part of your business.

Check Your Media Licenses. Stock photo companies use sophisticated image scanning to seek out unlicensed images on the web, filing immediate infringement often over $5000 per image. Take the time to locate licenses for each image used, even if someone else did the website.

Start A Blog. These widely misunderstood publishing platform that forms the foundation for social media involvement. Unfortunately, they are frequently set up and used incorrectly – so now is a great time to do it right.

Get Involved in Social Media. Authentic and unselfish participation in discussions on social networks has a magical effect on reputation, especially keeping in mind that hundreds may review what you’ve posted. There’s no faster way to grow trust and authority in your market in front of people who matter.

Master Wide Area Access. I’ve been surprised how few businesses are able to connect while out with customers. Now’s a great time to master this.

Participate in Q&A Sites and Forums. Taking the time to answer a couple of questions a week in your industry can grow online authority and trust in a way that costs very little. Examples include LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers.

Install Website Analytics. It usually takes an hour to set up Google Analytics and start getting insights into a web site visitors’ behavior as well as which marketing mechanisms are working.

Set Up Remote Access. If you travel, having the ability to remotely access your office computers can save a meeting or hours of driving.

Read These New Media Books Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, and Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae are examples that can transform thinking and get you ready for the future.

Get SPAM Under Control. A hosted solution such as spamstopshere can save a business thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity for just a few dollars per user per month, and takes just a few hours to set up.

Secure Laptops and Portable Drives. Lost or stolen laptops and “thumbdrives” represent a huge risk that can open your business to huge and even litigation. Securing these data for transport is relatively easy and affordable.

Shore Up Your Content Filtering. Studies show that 25-30% of work computers have illegal or inappropriate files such as pornographic images stored on them, exposing business to potentially disastrous litigation and embarrassment.

Update Your Wireless Network. These are huge productivity helpers but most are set up improperly or use old security standards. This can expose a business invasion by opportunistic hackers or simple bandwidth leeches.  When you’re done securing it, consider providing Wi-Fi access to your customers.  I mean, even McDonalds is doing it.

Solicit Customer Ratings. Many regional search engines and city-wide websites have the ability for customers to rate your company. While you never want to “buy” ratings or rate yourself, asking your best customers to give their thoughts can give you a competitive advantage in those searches.

Bonus Tips:

Research Lower Cost Healthcare Programs for Employees.  I do not want to advocate reducing the quality of the program, but choosing one that offers higher levels of automation, web-access, and still maintains the care for your employees may be available

Consider Outsourcing. Tim Ferris brought this idea to the general public by quoting A. J. Jacobs’ Esquire article “My outsourced life” in his best-selling book “The Four Hour Workweek“.  Things just keep getting better and in a few days of note-taking, I’m betting you could create a list of outsourcable tasks.

Saw Image by Chrissy W used under Creative Commons Image

• Should we redesign our website?
• What should we do to increase our search rank?
• How can we decrease our shopping cart abandonment rate?

I have well rehearsed and probably pretty accurate answers for each question, and people left very satisfied with my consultation (I ask.)  Some wanted to move forward, others didn’t.

But my attitude has been changing and I cannot ignore it.  I have been thinking of tribes, and how communities are exerting a more powerful force on the success of new ideas than ever before.  I have been thinking about what branding means.  And I’ve been thinking about the whole company-customer relationship and what it means for my clients.

How do you, as an outsider, take on the role of heretic?  Is it enough to be skilled at finding latent “movements” and helping companies catalyze them?  Where are the opportunities - what is the need?

Some initial thoughts:

• Who gets it?  Who will actively create a manifesto and attempt to unite a community?
• Who has time for it?  Tribal marketing takes a long time - and there is no way to short-cut it.
• Who is willing to give up control?  Letting the community inter-connect under your umbrella is a risky proposition.  There is a loss of control that goes with that.
• Who will postpone monetization?  By the time people contact me they are already acting on some sort of company initiative or problem.  Asking them to ignore that is difficult.

These questions are getting louder every day.

Goal: Connecting Your Expertise With Those Who Need It - Fast and Without Noise.

When an expert provides solid, authentic responses as answers in Q&A networks such as Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIN answers, Experts Exchange, Google Groups (which scours pretty much every forum on the web,) and similar sites, they can enhance their reputation, drive visitors a site or blog, produce content, build a brand and ultimately drive real sales.

A Little Bit About Q/A Social Sites

Being one of the first two answers to any relevant question can substantially improve the chances of being voted a “best answer” and being read by more interested people. So fast is good.

• If your answer is good (duh!) fewer will bother to answer the question, and you’ll have a better chance of being the “best” answer everyone reads.
• Few people read more than a couple of answers + the best answer. Being at the top means you’ll get the attention.
• People are more likely to vote you up because you’re above the fold, and plainly, the best answer :-)

For my example, I’ll use Yahoo! Answers - but any group search/forum search tool would work.

TIP: On Yahoo! Answers you can answer quickly, and then “edit” your answer to fill in the details. As of this writing that will secure your position in the answers.

Flipping The Funnel

Answering consumer questions is a solid investment of time, but there are ways to make technology work for you and reduce the amount of work it requires to monitor your particular niche. This post is about using such technology to isolate just those consumers who need you and eliminate the other noise.

Keep in mind that answering questions does not just speak to the single person who asked the question, but also for the dozens or hundreds of people who will encounter the response sooner or later. You are using your answers as precision authentic content and offering it to people online.

Cutting Through The Noise

Yahoo! Answers is a horrribly “noisy” environment at times. You’ll see questions like these all the time: “Where can I get a free _______” and “I need a cheap or free ______” and they are often out-of-category. Manually monitoring Yahoo! answers is tedious and often makes one lose faith in the human race :-) - so we’ll filter that stuff out and lift you above your competition.

So we will use several services to slice, dice, and deliver only the Yahoo! answers you care about to the destination of your choice, 24×7, without your intervention. You can then skim this distilled list and answer the questions.

The Tools

In this example, I will utilize three services (and one optional add-on.)

• Yahoo! Answers to find the questions (this could be any Q/A site with RSS)
• ZapTXT and their awesome new version to send you notifications via SMS (text message) or email.
  (You can use other similar services if you choose, such as Google alerts, etc.)
• Vertical Response Email Marketing
• Twitter for ping marketing.
• Google Talk Instant Messaging (Any IM works)
• My mobile phone (to get SMS messages)

Let’s get Started!

1. Set up a Yahoo! Account (if you don’t already have one) - you’ll need it for Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Pipes. Make sure to save your username and password - Yahoo! is hard to recover. I recommend you consider setting your business name as your yahoo account (and for other social profiles too) in this case.

2. Set up an email list. In the case of my client, the subject matter was related to horse wounds, so they should set up an email list called “This Week in Equine First Aid” or “What’s New in Horse Wound Care.” This list will be the touch point over time that keeps your brand in the consumer’s mind. Vertical Response email marketing tool is excellent for this purpose.

3. Set up a custom landing page on your website for Yahoo! Answer Traffic. The goal of this page is twofold. One, get people on your email list and two, offer them your product. Ideally the page would also have a “share with friend” and some amazingly good content. If the visitor leaves without buying anything or signing up for your mailing list, you probably won’t see them again.

You can use an existing web page for this but I don’t recommend it. A purpose built page will work twice as well!

TIP: Don’t forget Twitter! You can ask them for their twitter id or simply to follow your business. Then you can draw attention to new questions being answered through that channel as well.

4. Visit http://answers.yahoo.com and drill-down (using the Categories) to the closest niche to your business. For my example, I’m going to use a client in the equine industry, WoundAde, who sells a product that increases the speed of healing for horse wounds.

Once you’ve landed on the proper category, scroll down and RIGHT CLICK “RSS” and select “copy link” or “copy link location” - this puts the RSS address in your clipboard. You’re going to need that shortly.

5. Visit ZapTXT.com and click on “Get Started”
Zaptxt is an awesome cool new service that monitors, filters, and triggers alerts all from RSS feeds. It then intelligently sends alerts to whatever device is available or according to your specific times.  ZapTxt works with almost all IM clients (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, GTalk and Skype) - I personally like using it with Gtalk because it also runs on the iphone/Blackberry.

6. Set up a “ZapTask”
Add the keywords you want to search for (just use one for now)
I entered: “wound” (for now)
Paste the URL for the Yahoo RSS feed into the “Website/Feed to monitor”
I pasted http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/catq?sid=2115500432

8. Click on “next step”

9. Name your filter
I used “Yahoo Answers - Horse Wounds” as the name - remember you may add more sources later.

10. Set up your Filter
Now we’re going to expand the set of keywords that will be filtered from the feed. We started out with “wound” but that was just a temporary measure. Using the ‘advanced search’ on ZapTXT, you will enter your full set of words. This set may expand or contract later.

Select “Advanced Search”
Enter the keywords to filter for in the “with at least one of these words” section.
I used “wound skin flesh infection scrape cuts cut gash sores wounds”
Enter any “negative” phrases in the “without the words” section.
I used “cutting cutter” (a type of horse)

11. Adjust your notification settings
This will depend on how you want to be notified. Remember, timing is everything, so I recommend instant message or SMS.

12: Optional/Recommended: Grab Your Filtered Stream as RSS If you use an RSS reader such as iGoogle + RSS Gadget, Bloglines, Google Reader, or Klipfolio, you can get a feed for the FILTERED stream coming from Yahoo! answers delivered as a regular RSS feed. This is great if you want to share the feed with others or possibly even re-publish it! Back on the ZapTasks list, just choose the zaptask that you want to get over RSS, Just click on the RSS logo and voila!:

13. WHEW!!!!

Okay, now you will begin to receive notifications of Yahoo! Questions that include the keywords you consider yourself an expert on. When these come in, you can visit Yahoo! Answers and begin to establish yourself as the “person who knows everything about ____________” online. People will wonder if you spend all day inside of Yahoo Answers :-)

14. NOW… Get To Answering Questions

Your answers on Yahoo! should be well thought out, researched, and posted rather quickly. You should include, on every post, a link to the “custom” web page we referred to earlier. But the “feeling” of every question should be more like “word of mouth” wisdom than a canned corporate answer. Be yourself, be helpful, authentic and transparent - don’t get dragged down into unproductive time sinks.) If you’re lucky, you’ll get asked to participate in articles and blog posts that are relevant to your own business (we filtered, remember!)

Optional TIP: If your domain is lame, use a custom domain name for this page (most registrars will let you forward a domain to any web page.) Example: If you are answering questions about 57 Chevys, consider registering “57ChevyAnswers.com”, forwarding it to your landing page, and using that in your Yahoo! Answers link.

15. Use your growing asset to grow your bottom line!

Soon, you’ll start to notice traffic on that page, and people signing up for your emails. After your email list gets 40-50 people, you can start your weekly newsletter. This becomes a great way to increase traffic, blog readership, and sales TIP: Google Alerts or RSS is your best friend for getting newsletter content.

CAUTION: Sadly, here’s where a lot of people will go wrong. They get impatient. They’ll start sending out spammy offers and the customers will start unsubscribing. You must not do this. The information to sales ratio of the email campaigns should be 8:1 or 10:1.

Suggested content:

• New advances in your product space, written in simple English and skimmable.
• Product reviews (often you can get samples of products for free.)
• Customer questions answered (Yahoo! Answer questions you’ve answered are fine.)
• “In next week’s issue” (Always have a reference forward to something terrific. It keeps people subscribed and it motivates you to plan!)
• Ability to share with a friend. Vertical Response has this built-in.
• Of course… a link to your product page

16. Add More Filtered Feeds!

The method above works the same for any social network out there that publishes an RSS feed. You can add blog RSS feeds, Google Search RSS, and more. If you’re feeling ambitious, Yahoo! Pipes will allow even more advanced combinations of feeds. But the “core” idea on these steps works exactly the same!

But keep in mind - stay focused on connecting with customer in need, with minimal delay.

17. Long-Term: Optimize your landing page

The custom page you set up to receive visitors may not be quite as effective as you like. The good news is that you can try out different approaches and see what works. This is why having it as a separate page is such a good idea - the “type” of visitor is different than the rest of your site, so being able to optimize for that group of people is a huge advantage.

That’s It!

Please let me know how this works for you by leaving comments!

Photo by ben jones used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License - thanks Ben!

This crowdsourcing approach has promise and it will become clear where as the weeks and months pass.  But with such a simplified and accessible tool like this available for free, we may see organizations begin to use it for casual meeting organization, conferences, and who-knows-what.

So keep all of that in mind as you read my ideas for how to use Google Moderator in your business:

1. Organizing meeting agendas or committee meetings
   Why ramble about things nobody cares about? Let meeting attendees post their questions before the meeting and then rate their importance so the meeting agenda can be adjusted and made more efficient. But will those who are worse about babbling on take the time to use the tool or is it more about alpha personalities?  I love the idea of walking into a meeting and knowing that the questions that were most important to the participants will be up first.  There is no hiding from the reality of a vote like this.
2. Organizing conference sessions (duh!) or saving your ass in a presentation.
   Very similar to meetings, but for groups of people who may want to decide IF they want to attend a given session. By reviewing the session voting before choosing to attend, they can get a sense of the crowd and how the session might go. Conferences such as SXSW have been doing panel voting for a while, so this idea is well proven. If you find your presentation/agenda is going downhill, crowdsourcing “day 2″ etc. might save the day.
3. Organizing FAQs for a company, product, or service.
   Frequently asked questions about your company should truly answer questions people care about. Most FAQs are too well crafted and sound inauthentic, so Google Moderator may be a way to obtain a well sorted list to then transfer to your website later.  I think the organization may want to post the ’seed’ questions first, and let consumers add new ones in their own voice. The same can be said for creating relevant FAQs over time for products or services. The question remains if Google will put together an API that lets us embed such features into websites directly and avoiding opening a new tab, etc.
4. Deciding on product features/offerings, fleshing out concepts
   If you are considering starting up a business or creating a product, you can create a list of suggested questions and put them to the vote. “What’s more important to you…” or “When do you find yourself considering…” might be some great starter questions. While I believe one can do this with pay-per-click or other methods, this adds a new dimension to the equation. While this method has its problems, there may be something to the methodology.
5. Designing interviews or research projects
   If you have a plan to interview someone, you can pose a few suggested questions to your readership before the scheduled interview. You can then be relatively sure that you’ll hit the points that people care about while structuring the interview well. This has been done in other places before, but Google Moderator makes it pretty damn easy. If you have limited time or funds, you can use this tool to determine the questions you should answer in your outcomes (especially when you’re publicly funded or your audience reaction has a big influence on your work.)
6. Creation of how-to articles, email newsletters or videos.
   If you’ve put out a new product or service, you may not be sure which technical support or customer support questions are most important. We, as technologists often overlook the questions most important to the average user. We might think that getting the USB 2.0 interface at maximum speed matters, while the consumers just want to know where the switch is to turn off the damn sound.
7. Live Q&A for webcasts or other “distance learning” scenarios
   Google Moderator seems pretty fast, so if you’re interested in doing live Q&A for a webcast or possibly an online presentation, you can use it to gather and field questions DURING the session. The pace means very few votes will be cast for each question. I guess it remains to be seen if this will work well versus something simple like Twitter for voting. One must be careful that voting does not distract too much from the presentation as well.
8. Bonus Idea 1: Deciding on Email Newsletter Topics
   If you’re thinking of sending out a newsletter or other marketing communications to thousands of people, it might pay to let people show you what they care about before sending it, thus reducing opt-out rates and improving retention. Just make sure the target audience matches the ones who are voting.

Concerns and Other Thoughts

But how many participants and votes must you have before it is useful? Is it risky to use the tool with a

group of, say 50 people? 20? I have often wondered why systems such as LinkedIN and Yahoo Answers never allowed people to vote on questions (it would be a great idea to get rid of the riff-raff) but they must have their reasons. Tools like Amazon’s askville have voting on questions now.

Other posts on Google Moderator

Andy Beal - Google Moderator Launches, Raising the Question: “Are Google Engineers Bored With Search?”

Mashable (Stan Schroeder)

Crowd photo by James Cridland

Web MD Most Popular Stories

1. 41 Ways to Flatten Your Belly
2. 6 Sex Mistakes Men Make
3. 9 Tips for Flat Abs
4. Sex Myths vs. the Facts
5. 11 Supplements to Boost Your Libido
6. Signs of Sun-Damaged Skin
7. 7 Slimming Tips From the Skinniest State
8. 5 Weight Gain Shockers
9. 25 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married
10. Salmonella Outbreak: Tomatoes Safe to Eat

As you can see the content that wins is ‘tabular’ in nature. That is, it tabulates in the form of a list or in a list of comparisons, etc.

My new friend and fellow Yahoo! Store Developer Rob Snell was invited by a director at Yahoo! Small Business to testify in front of Congress at a hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business about Online Advertising. His preperation and written testimony was easy-to-read and Rob published it here at Search Engine Land. You should definitely read that first.

Now that’ he’s back and rested, with a fresh .gov link in his pocket, I thought I’d ask him a few short questions about how it went, what it was like as an experience, and what he thought it meant for search marketing’s future.

Scott: We had lunch at SMX Advanced and know you’ve been on the road pretty much since then. I want to thank you for carving out a few minutes with me.

Rob: Not a problem!

Scott: The public has had a difficult time understanding search marketing. Did you feel that the assembled panel truly understood the industry?

Rob: Yep. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, especially. He understands the overall concepts from top to bottom. Was asking good questions about the specific applications. Lynn Westmoreland, too. I think the DUMMIES material helped, but these guys were sharp.

Scott: Did you stick to your written testimony? If not, what areas did you expand on?

Rob: Written testimony was 5 minutes. Q&A ran almost 2 hours. You can watch highlights on Youtube.

Scott: What other types of testimonies did you hear on the panel?

Rob: It was a good panel. I was able to talk about Gun Dog Supply, our family’s web store. There was a content guy who runs Adsense, Askthebuilder.com’s Tim Carter, who really has his act together. The Retailer of the group was SkyFacet.com, and their CEO and Founder Paul Sanar (23 years old) does 5x the volume we do, which speaks volumes. Randall Rothenberg was there as head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and represents Web publishers and advertisers and was very, very knowledgeable. Lastly, Richard Lent, CEO of AgencyNet NYC brought extremely well-rounded knowledge, mostly from working with upper end clients. They were all well-prepared.

Questions Asked To Rob

• How do retailers deal with all these keywords?
• Would I sell my keyword lists?
• How can small firms get into buying paid search ads?
• How easy is it to get online? And launch paid search ads?
• Are you afraid of Google’s domination in the search engines?
• What are the differences in free search and paid search?
• What did we think Congress should do? What should Congress NOT do?
• For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

Scott: Coming out of it, how did the SEM industry fare in the minds of the audience?

Rob: Great! It was more SEM in general and paid search than SEO. The panel was ONLINE ADVERTISING and SEO was a small part of that. Personally, I was afraid that the “SEO is snake oil” problem would rear its head, and the only negative I heard was the “I paid an SEO $35,000 and I got banned from Google” horror story, but IMHO dude should have done his homework before paying that kind of cash to an SEO.

Scott: What do you think the SEM industry could learn from what you heard?

Rob: Google needs to be careful. Congress can step in at any moment and regulate our industry if they think they need to do so. Kinda scary!

Scott: Cool Rob, I’ll look forward to your wrap up later. Get some rest!

Rob: Thanks!

For more… click on Rob’s wrapup

Last week we went to Eastern Kentucky to pick up our daughters who were attending an equestrian sleep-away camp. When we arrived, we noticed the other kids were calling our daughters by camp nicknames. For camp it was fun. One of my kids liked their name, while the other one didn’t care for it.

It struck me that nicknames given to you by your camp-mates are much like how public perception treat brands in the age of consumer participation. Kids that are popular or well liked proudly answer to “Braveheart” or “Gypsy Queen” while unpopular kids suffer the week as “Birdlegs” or “Pigpen.” They might like to change their name, or the name might be unfair, but as soon as more than one person talks about it, it sticks. Even with a huge effort, sometimes it cannot be corrected (e.g. giving other camp mates $40 to not call you that name for the rest of the week perhaps.) It would have been much easier to befriend the leaders of the group earlier, as good interaction skills can often make up for, well, bird-legs.

The first person likely talk about you in public circles holds amazing power if they are an influencer. If you hear the name early you might prevent the nickname spreading through some reputation management. Let things get out of hand and they will tell others your name… the problem is exponential… not much you can do about the name or perception.

What nickname would your customers give you?

photo by Katherine and used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

• She found the first animals besides humans to use tools.
• She discovered that chimpanzees have wars, and that they adopt unrelated children.
• She discovered they ate meat.
• She forced us to reconsider what “man” means.

Goodall didn’t force her way into the group. She spent months sitting in a spot she called “the peak” learning by watching with her binoculars. From this distance, she noted patterns, such as the hierarchy of the community and slowly earned the trust of the skittish Gombe chimps.

One day a male chimp approached the camp, leaping, screaming, and running in circles. It was terrifying, and most of us would have either ran or taken a defensive posture. But Goodall had learned enough to see through the dramatic display and stayed calm. After a few tense moments, it became clear why it was there. The male chimp only wanted a banana that had been hanging in the camp. Goodall gave it to him, and history was made.

The rest of the community saw what the first chimp had done, and that Goodall had not harmed them, and the trust spread. Over the following years, she became the only known person to be fully accepted into a Chimpanzee community. If she and her team had been assertive, insensitive or clumsy, the community would have sounded a warning cry and a very tall wall of defense would have been erected.

The “Goodall Effect” allowed integration into the social fabric of the Gombe community, and could be a good metaphor for educating traditional brand managers about integrating into the fabric of social networks.

Listen first, learn, offer something of value, learn the culture, and never ever betray the trust.

Photo taken by user:Jeek in w:Hong Kong University, Hong Kong on 24 October 2004.

My feelings are that the number of visits (and votes) you obtain from a strong social media presence have long-term benefits that transcend the spikes and that these deserve a discussion.

Authority Influences Search Influences Increasingly Targeted Traffic Over Time.

People use search to find what they’re after 85% of the time and top search results are obtained through authority and trust. Google ranks things based on its best guess of trust and authority, as does Yahoo!, Live.com, Technorati, and del.icio.us. We want links and votes from important groups of people for their click-traffic, but also so that we rank better in the search engines.

Social media opens doors that other forms of marketing cannot.

Godin may not be considering that this unfocused traffic is just the frothy, chaotic front of a wave after which important, difficult-to-acquire links follow. To use Godin’s terminology, it’s then the “sneezers” who use social media’s ability to sift out important stuff using crowd wisdom (votes in this case.) If you have remarkable stuff, social media can float you through “the dip” of today’s river of news in a way you’d never achieve otherwise.

In Purple Cow, Godin wrote:

• Sell what people are buying
• Focus on the early adopters and sneezers
• Make it remarkable enough for them to pay attention
• Make it easy for them to spread
• Let it work its own way to the mass market.

Sneezers have established trust in their community online - at varying levels - in sort of a steep tail. They resist marketing efforts to influence their words and protect their reputations. Words and Links from these people usually cannot be bought at any price, and they’ve probably forgotten what a press release looks like. They have earned, through authority granted by others, a place in the search engines’ hearts.

So take a fictional moderately popular Digg post that brings traffic to your site…

• Short term Digg Visits: 5000
• Short Term Exit Rate: 90%
• Short term Conversions: 0 (dry those tears, it gets better)
• Rank for your favored keyword on Google before: 40
• Short term Influencer Visits: 200
• Influencer links: 5
• Subsequent sub-influencer links: 50
• Visits (over time) via the influencer links: 5000 targeted visitors.
• Visits (over time) via increased search rank: 5000 somewhat targeted visitors.
• Digg who?

Okay, you can beat up my numbers but the point I want to make is that this traffic is a means to an end, not the end itself. By the time you’re seeing the effects of your work on social media, you have long fallen off of the front page of Digg, and your Stumbleupon traffic may be in the dumpster. The beat goes on.

To sum up…A popular Digg/Stumble/Reddit post has these effects:

• A often dramatic spike in traffic - with a high bounce rate. Noisy.
• Attention granted by influencers who use Digg/Stumble votes as a filter on what’s important.
• Improved search rank due to persistent authority linkages from relevant conversations elsewhere.
• A sustained increase in relevant, high quality traffic through the direct-click traffic of the new links found in the long-tail of referrals from influencers.
• A slow increase in trust for your site as an authority by the influencers (they may look more closely at your next post / product / idea. Darren Rowse calls this a “Digging Culture”
• Increased attention via RSS and newsletter subscriptions.

Anytime someone mentions “Digg” and “Conversions” in the same paragraph, I get nervous. So let me know what you think about this explanation.

So Seth, from a big fan, I say to you that silly traffic might not be that silly after all.

Illustration by geishaboy500 used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Ok, it’s the middle of the night and I’m sitting in a rock hard airport chair, but my mind is on the takeaways that I have from the SMX Social Media conference. Much of this I knew, but it was heavily re-enforced.

The bigest benefit, as with most of these small shows, is the contacts and friendships I have started or continued. I think the best in the world were at the show, and for clients who seek out these people, huge success awaits.

While I think the overall presentation quality was high, my favorites were Randy Woods‘ well-grounded discussion and Rob Key’s insightful discussion about tribal culture and Second Life. I was also impressed by Brent Csutoras’ discussion about link building.

But the client-marketer relationship was the one thing that bugged me most. Nobody seemed keen on sharing information about this essential element of the SMM profession, yet I could definitely sense lots of folks were seeking it. I often wonder if conference organizers should think more about the harsh, real-world realities of getting programs like these in place. Or perhaps there’s just no way to wrap that up into a single presentation.

20 Take-Aways:

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is terrific for link building, not for conversions. This is a major change for many marketers to internalize and incorporate into their offering.
2. It takes a special kind of client/consultant relationship to make SMM work. It’s closer to organic SEO work than any other web marketing in the “grind-it-out” nature.
3. SMM cannot be sold as a one-off service or “by the campaign.” Too many external variables mean you have to execute many campaigns over time to hedge your bets. To sell as a one-off service is to invite failure and client ill-will.
4. SMM requires incredible organization on the part of the marketer. Both to keep track of a campaign and to make sure not to break out of acceptable tribal ‘participation.’
5. SMM link building requires a keen eye for linkbait that relates to your marketing goals and finesse to make sure it’s not overtly sales-like in presentation.
6. Vertical social networks should be an important part of any campaign. Smaller numbers of highly enthusiastic players are using these sites.
7. Explaining SMM to clients is going to be very, very difficult. But those who have an inherent curiosity and willingness to participate will earn a strong competitive advantage.
8. Having a strong network of friends is essential to SMM, and that network requires daily nurturing.
9. Wikipedia makes Digg look like a baby traffic wise, and there are opportunities…but…
10. Wikipedia sessions feel a lot like COBOL classes. Even if the people are smart, that whole thing requires a really strong level of patience and persistence. But 5m+ page views daily makes marketers salivate.
11. People need to create policies to outline who owns SMM profiles, what happens when there is a change of hands.
12. To succeed in social network marketing, plugged-in individuals who know the “tribe’s habits” will win. 20-year PR veterans need not apply if they are still in the mindset of the press release or are unwilling to spend time participating before promoting. Plenty of people have got in trouble.
13. There are a lot of really smart people in SMM. Compared to other forms of marketing, the growth and opportunity aligns with trends towards authenticity, word-of-mouth, and making up for short consumer attention spans.
14. One of my greatest worries is that clients will write off SMM while their competition runs with it. I worry because catch-up is a tough game to play in SMM and you can’t rush it.
15. Even one SPAM slip-up in a social network can ruin an entire branding or SMM effort. Social networks have zero tolerance for screw-ups. Re-building a profile can take 6 months or more of hard work.
16. SMM is risky if your brand is fragile or an easy target - putting your brand out in the public eye requires awareness of the cost-benefits. Almost always it’s worth it - that is if you sell a decent product, but you will need to weather the storm of negatives that will come your way with skill.
17. Advertising agencies don’t get it, for the most part.
18. SEO/SMM are joined at the hip for many things and a link building effort can stack up dozens if not hundreds of authority links…but direct-click traffic itself, independent of the SEO/link advantages, can be significant.
19. Participation in social networks - real participation - is a requirement, and is very time consuming. I left wondering who will pay for this time.
20. Red-eyes suck.

A few other places to get SMX social-media related information. Add more to comments and I’ll add to this list with ‘follow’

Coverage of the Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales panel
More coverage of the Social Search: The Human Challengers
Social Media Marketing Essentials
Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking