YouTube is best known for its viral videos of babies and cats. But there are thousands of decidedly less cute videos racking up the views. How-to videos are extremely popular and some of the creators are actually making serious money.
Want to know how to crochet a flower or solve a Rubik’s Cube? How about a guide for making a paper airplane? There’s even a video with detailed instructions on how to use clip-in hair extensions.
Sara White, a first grade teacher in Charleston, W.Va., is the woman behind a series of popular videos about hair extensions. White says she posted her first video about hair extensions because she couldn’t find a good instructional video on YouTube. When the clicks started adding up, she started adding new videos.
She eventually joined YouTube’s partner program, where the site shares ad revenue with people who post videos regularly.
“I thought, ‘Well, I won’t make that much money from it,’” White says. “You know, I thought I’ll make a couple dollars a month. But I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ I don’t have to get a second job now.”
Making Over $100,000
This is a common experience among YouTube’s 15,000 or so partners.
“A lot of YouTubers describe themselves as accidental entrepreneurs,” says Annie Baxter, a YouTube spokesperson.
YouTube says there are hundreds of people who make more than $100,000 a year on their videos. Baxter says instructional videos are on the rise.
Geoff Dorn knows this market well. He’s the man behind a series of videos on how to tie a tie.
In the video, you can’t see Dorn’s face — just a close-up of his neck, his white dress shirt and pale blue tie. With a monotone voice, he carefully describes the mechanics of the four-in-hand knot.
“That was shot in my kitchen,” Dorn says. “I think I tacked a white sheet up against what was a red wall.”
That incredibly dry video has been viewed six million times. He also has videos on the full Windsor, the half Windsor, the Shelby knot and the bow tie.
“It’s nice to get paid for doing absolutely nothing, or doing something once,” Dorn says, adding that he can pay his property taxes each year with the money he gets from Youtube.
He lives in Portland, Ore., and works in finance. And Dorn does actually wear a tie to work every day. But that’s not why he decided to make videos about tying ties.
“You know, any entrepreneur gets an idea that they want to make whatever, donuts — they want to make whatever they think they’re good at,” Dorn says. “But what you really should do is figure out what the market is and make that.”
He says he made these videos because he knew there was demand.
While Dorn’s videos seem to lack personality by design, Sean Plott’s videos embrace it.
Plott has a daily Web show that focuses on the computer game Starcraft II. His mission: helping a growing community of fellow players improve.
In his videos, Plott goes by his gaming handle Day[9]. He says the videos really took off when he started talking more about himself.
Source: YouTube
“It wasn’t just Day[9], the analytical nerd who just sat down and only talked about how to improve and how to learn,” he says. “It became this edutainment show and that helped tremendously.”
So much so that when Plott finishes his master’s degree at the University of Southern California later this year, he plans to make this Web show his full-time job.
26 Shockingly Offensive Vintage Ads That Would Never Fly Today
Ran across a bunch of shocking advertising images on Business Insider and thought I’d share. It’s amazing how time changes our perspective on what’s acceptable in the media. I wonder what the ads of today will look like to those 50+ years in the future? Check out all the pics at http://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-sexist-and-racist-ads-2011-6?op=1
Would You Take Business Advice From a College Student?
This is an interesting article I found in Inc. Magazine. The advertising and marketing landscape is quickly being reshaped and it serves businesses to be in touch with youth. In fact, it’s a worthwhile investment in the future of your business. Enjoy!
Would You Take Business Advice From a College Student?
Why Jen O’Neal, founder of Tripping, created an advisory board of young people
By Jennifer Alsever | From the May 2011 issue of Inc. magazine
Courtesy Company
Student Teachers Tripping co-founders Jen O’Neal and Nate Weisiger (front) lean on young people for marketing advice.
Before launching a new marketing campaign, Jen O’Neal first ran the idea by her board. O’Neal is CEO of Tripping, a San Francisco–based Internet start-up that connects world travelers with local hosts, who offer sightseeing tips, conversation, and sometimes a free place to crash. To promote the site in Barcelona, O’Neal was considering hosting evening events on college campuses. Board member Jacopo Bordin shot down the idea. After class, he said, young Europeans aren’t hanging out on campus—they are relaxing at wine bars and outdoor cafés.
Bordin should know. A 23-year-old student at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, he grew up in Italy. Bordin sits on Tripping’s social media board, a 10-person team of twentysomethings who advise O’Neal on marketing to students, the site’s primary users.
O’Neal and her co-founder, Nate Weisiger, came up with the idea for the advisory board last year after hiring an intern to manage the company’s blog, Twitter feed, and other social media efforts. Some 200 young people applied for the position. After making her choice, O’Neal sat down to toss out the rest of the applications, many of which included enthusiastic stories about travel and studying abroad. “I didn’t want to delete the e-mails,” she says. “I hated the idea of releasing all these people and not coming into contact with them again.”
At the time, Tripping had just three employees and didn’t have the resources to hire any more. But O’Neal and Weisiger thought the young people would make great advisers. To determine which candidates had the most creativity and enthusiasm—and ability to get the word out about Tripping—the co-founders decided to hold a contest. They went through the intern applications and challenged the 40 most promising candidates to vie for spots on the board. The contenders had three weeks to generate as much online buzz as possible about Tripping. About half of the people O’Neal contacted took her up on the challenge.
The contenders used various tactics to get the word out about the company. Because Tripping markets itself as a place to get insider travel tips from locals, Katy Birnbaum, then a San Francisco State University senior, made an online video of the 1 a.m. swarm of people lining up for fresh doughnuts at Bob’s Donut & Pastry, a popular hangout for college students. Lauren Nicholl, a graduate of the University of California, Davis, contacted popular travel bloggers and raved about Tripping. She also took to Twitter, posting information about Tripping as well as links to travel articles and famous quotes about travel.
Whenever O’Neal updated the company’s blog, the young people would flood it with comments. The CEO was impressed by the group’s eagerness. “You could see this rivalry,” she says. “They were trying to edge each other out. We didn’t think people would work that hard to get a seat on this new board we just invented.” In the end, O’Neal chose 10 of the applicants for the board—Birnbaum and Nicholl made the cut.
The board members don’t have daily responsibilities. They primarily act as brand ambassadors and offer the co-founders opinions, advice, and ideas. “It feels completely different than an internship,” says Bordin. “You feel more involved, more rewarded.”
Already, the board members have contributed many new ideas. “They have grown up with technology in ways I didn’t,” says O’Neal, who is 31. “Some of the best ideas came from people who barely had any work experience.” Birnbaum, for instance, came up with a feature called video validation, which helps travelers vet potential hosts in other cities. Since its founding, Tripping has encouraged users to rate and review hosts, but O’Neal wanted to add another level of verification for young travelers who would be meeting up with strangers or staying in their homes. Birnbaum suggested that Tripping interview hosts remotely using Skype; Tripping would ask them to show their passports and proof of address during the video calls and would keep a record of the information.
O’Neal loved the idea and had Birnbaum head up the project. Not only has the video validation feature been popular with Tripping users, says O’Neal, but conducting Skype chats with hosts also provides valuable customer feedback that the company has used to improve the site.
Board members aren’t paid, but they receive training from Tripping’s co-founders. Weisiger teaches board members how to write Web code and create Facebook ads. O’Neal helps them with job hunting, polishing their resumés, and conducting mock interviews and introduces them to other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
Each board member determines his or her level of involvement. Bianca Cloutier, a recent Dartmouth graduate, already had a full-time job at a nonprofit in New York City, but she joined Tripping’s board because she wanted to get experience at a tech company and learn more about business development. Jeff Manheimer, Tripping’s vice president of business development, invited her to tag along when he went to meetings on the East Coast. She watched him create promotional partnerships with groups like university study-abroad programs. Working nights and weekends, Cloutier eventually signed up six new partners, including the alumni network of AmeriCorps, a student volunteer organization with more than 600,000 alums. “This was perfect for me,” says Cloutier. “The flexibility was great.”
The social media board has also become a useful recruiting tool for Tripping. Since creating it, O’Neal has hired four board members as full-time employees. And she plans to keep adding members to the social media board as the company grows. “It’s so easy to see who is passionate,” says O’Neal. “Some of them really shined.”
For tips on assembling an advisory board, including how to choose the right members, compensate participants, and structure board meetings, go to www.inc.com/building-a-board-of-advisors.
via inc.com
NPR Repost: Making Money On YouTube
So, there are people making over $100,000 a year making primarily instructional videos through YouTube’s partner program. That’s pretty amazing stuff and a sign of how profound change is afoot in the media and communications industries. Check out the videos they posted for the NPR article. There’s no high production value… just ordinary folks doing their thing. The key is that they are providing info that may be useful or entertaining to a group or group of folks. Just more proof that we truly live in an attention economy. Enjoy!
RISE Video: Branding Your Creativity Through Social Media
Here are some excerpts from the Branding Your Creativity Through Social Media talk I did with Korey Coleman during RISE. Creator of the entertainment web site Spill.com, Korey traces his evolution from public access television to YouTube and eventually being acquired by Hollywood.com. Throughout this time, Korey has utilized free and low cost web and social media tools such as iTunes, Ustream, Skype and the social networking platform Ning to attract more than 1 million visitors a week!
Part 1 – Leveraging Social Media To Build A Culture Part 2 – Using Free and Cheap Webcasting Tools Part 3 – Creating Custom Campaigns Part 4 – Pitfalls of Doing It Cheap
Part 5 – Q & A
Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation [OPINION]
Great article on content curation and what I call the Attention Economy we now live in. In fact, that is the last term that students participating in the Media Xperiments interactive curriculum must show mastery of before being accepted into our Summer Service Learning Institutes. The barriers to quality content creation and production have almost disappeared. Those that can effectively aggregate content in a timely manner will exert the most influence in the coming years.
This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.
Steven Rosenbaum is a curator, author, filmmaker and entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Magnify.net, a real-time video curation engine for publishers, brands, and websites. His book Curation Nation from McGrawHill Business was published this week.
The personal web publishing boom has led to an information explosion. It’s a data free-for-all, and it’s just beginning. Andrew Blau is a researcher and the co-president of Global Business Network in San Fransisco. Blau has foretold the changes in media distribution and content creation. Now he’s watching this new, historic emergence of first-person publishing.
Today, publishing tools have been set free, Blau says. Cost, ownership, and barriers to entry are all gone, almost overnight. “The ability to amplify one’s voice, to amplify that beyond the reach of what we have had, reflects a change of course in human history.” He pointed to the difficultly of sorting through the riot of voices online. What that chaos needed was curation — a way to get value out of the information flood. But the role of the curator has been a contentious one, and not everyone has been on board with the concept.
Who Gets Heard?
All big changes have unintended consequences. Blau says that the old problem — limited access to the tools to amplify speech — has been fixed by the Internet. It used to be that making and moving information was so expensive that the question of who was going to get permission to speak was a central social and political issue. But now speech is more democratic.
That development, not surprisingly, creates a new problem. “The problem is who gets heard,” Blau says. “The real issue that remains is access to an audience. Because that’s hard. Access to technology has become trivially easy for most people in the industrialized world, and increasingly easy for people in the emerging economies around the world.”
Blau is right: Speech is easy. Being heard is hard and getting even harder. Computers can’t distinguish between data and ideas or between human intellect and aggregated text and links. This lack of aesthetic intelligence in a storm of data changes the game.
Are Content Aggregators Vampires?
Okay, let’s get this part out in the open: Creators don’t like coloring inside the lines. They’re fueled by a passion to make original work. But there’s a reason why painters don’t rent a storefront, hire a staff clad in black clothing, and throw endless cocktail parties with white wine and fancy hors d’oeuvres. That’s called a gallery, and a gallery owner is a curator. These are the people who enjoy the process of choosing what to hang, how to price it, and how to make sure painters have enough income to pay the rent and buy more paint and canvas. Hopefully.
The web doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. The folks who run the online galleries — the curators — aren’t asking permission or giving a revenue share, which means that content creators need to get comfortable with the idea that in the new world of the link economy, curating and creating aren’t mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: Seth Godin. He is one of the web’s best-known marketing wizards. He’s a speaker, author, website owner and entrepreneur. And he says that content creators can’t ignore curation any longer.
“We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage,” Godin said. “There’s always someone who’s going to supply you with information that you’re going to curate. The Guggenheim doesn’t have a shortage of art. They don’t pay you to hang paintings for a show — in fact you have to pay for the insurance. Why? Because the Guggenheim is doing a service to the person who’s in the museum and the artist who’s being displayed.”
As Godin sees it, power is shifting from content makers to content curators: “If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.”
This change is leaving folks who used to control distribution with less power to dictate terms. One of those folks is Mark Cuban. Cuban is a content creator. Or, more accurately, he owns assets that create branded content. He owns the Dallas Mavericks. He owns Magnolia Pictures. He owns HDNet. And he’s got a stake in a whole bunch of other stuff.
“The content aggregators are vampires!” said the always colorful Cuban. “Don’t let them suck your blood.” Cuban points to sites like Google News and The Huffington Post as the most aggressive content criminals. He tends to see no value in folks who gather, organize, summarize, or republish. He only finds value in content creation: “Vampires take but don’t give anything back.”
Not surprisingly, Godin wrinkles his nose at Cuban’s vampire metaphor. Simply put, he says it’s all wrong. “When a vampire sucks your blood, you make new blood,” Godin says. “The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There’s an exception for business information and super-timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win. I’m not talking about plagiarism; I’m talking about the difference between obscurity and piracy. If the taking is so whole that the original is worth nothing … that’s a problem.”
Robert Scoble also disagreed with Cuban’s horror-movie metaphor. “That’s ridiculous. Cuban is fun to argue with, but it’s ridiculous. I mean come on, The New York Times is an aggregator of a thousand people’s work. More than that if you include letters to the editor, opinions, and guest posts and contracted posts and contracted articles. The New York Times has been doing aggregation for a hundred years. To say that’s a vampire is just totally ridiculous.”
The Billion Dollar Opportunity
Scoble has declared curation as the next “billion dollar” opportunity and wonders aloud as to whether he should “create or curate” as tech news breaks in Silicon Valley. Scoble says a curator is “an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.”
“I used to drink from the real-time fire hose, because on the social web, everything was about real time,” says Brian Solis, author of Engage. “Then I realized over the years that it’s actually more about right time than real time. In fact, when information comes through, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the right time to engage, capture it, and share it. I’m more successful now creating a list of information, relevant information, and then repackaging, repurposing, and broadcasting that information at the right time.”
Getting people to pay attention to you — by following, friending, linking, or otherwise engaging — will have real economic value, says communications consultant and author Chris Brogan. “Attention is a currency, just like many others. We understand time and money as two interchangeable things. But attention is just as much something that needs to be arbitraged and disconnected from a 1:1 value. Said another way, ‘Attention costs me time and time is worth money, so attention by extension is worth money.’ ”
Conclusion
Data will be created with staggering speed, and systems will need to evolve to find, gather, and package data so that you can get what you need, when you need it, in coherent and useful bundles.
Curation taps the vast, agile, engaged human power of the web. It finds signal in the noise. And it’s most certainly going to unleash a new army of web editors armed with emerging curation tools.
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, flyparade and Flickr, epSos.de
via mashable.com
SXSW 2011 Blacks in Technology Weekend Recap | Black Web 2.0
via blackweb20.com
Glad to see that SXSW is being proactive and fostering the Blacks In Technology discussion. UT Professor, Dr. Craig Watkins is dead on when he speaks about the issue of making African-Americans more prevalent as producers of content and technology. Thanks also to Troy Nalls of Third Cousins Media for putting together this video.
RISE: Branding Your Creativity Through Social Media w Korey Coleman of Spill.com
Branding Your Creativity Through Social Media w Korey Coleman of Spill.com
The annual RISE (Relationship & Information Series for Entrepreneurs) conference is back next week with lots of terrific speakers. This is one of the better events for entrepreneurs and best of all it’s FREE. You get to interact with top notch entrepreneurs and creative professionals from all over the world in small group settings. It’s a great time to network and soak up the SUCCESS vibe. I highly encourage to participate. It kicks off Monday March 7th with former BET owner Robert Johnson and goes all week all over the city in offices, coffee houses and lecture halls.
I will be leading a discusion on Branding Your Creativity Through Social Media with local animator and film critic Korey Coleman. Korey is the creator of the entertainment web site Spill.com which features animated versions of him and several of his closest friends going on rants about movies, video games and whatever else comes to mind. Over the last 11 or so years, Korey has moved from public access television, to YouTube, to being picked up by an international pay per click ad company and finally being acquired by Hollywood.com all using free and low cost social media tools such as the social networking platform Ning, Skype and a host of other tools.
His site receives more than 1 million visitors per week and the average video on Spill is streamed over a quarter of a million times in one month. In short, Korey and his co-horts of Spill.com have better numbers than many cable television shows. So, we’ll talk about how he does it and hopefuly provide you with some ideas for leveraging your own creativity or passion using free and cheap tools.
Media / Advertising Boot Camp Applications for Minority Males
This is from Lincoln Stephens, founder of the Marcus Graham Project based in Dallas, TX. They are doing great work for clients such as AT&T. It’s great opportunity for minority males up to the age of 30 or so to gain experience and exposure to media and advertising careers. See, note pasted below.
The application deadline has been officially extended for The Marcus Graham Project’s summer boot camp program, entitled iCR8. The new deadline has been extended to Friday January 14, 2011. Please encourage minority males interested in advancing their careers in the advertising, marketing and media industries to apply IMMEDIATELY. We will also host a Q&A about the boot camp on our radio show, “The Drum” on January 9th. Mark our calender and also learn more about one of the boot camp assignments, developing an iPad app for John Legend’s non-profit, The Show Me Campaign: http://showmecampaign.org/news-media/marcus-graham-project-john-legend%E2%80%99s-show-me-campaign-partner-take-action-education-reform Candidates must posses a general knowledge of marketing, as well as exhibit creative spirit and strong communication/organizational skills. The type of participants that we are looking for include: social media, marketing, graphic design, copywriting, creative technology, video/audio production, video editing, events/promotions, research, and public relations. You must be willing to learn an extreme amount of valuable information in a short period of time. Ideal candidates should seek to build resume experience, while gaining invaluable networking and knowledge about the industry. If you are interested in this opportunity, please register on our social networking site and download the application packet at:http://www.marcusgrahamproject.org/MGP_Summer_Bootcamp_Application_Packet2011.pdf. If you have any questions please contact us at: info@marcusgrahamproject.org.
The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 2
This article by Brian Solis appears to be spot on. The future of marketing lies in engagement. We have to find ways to tell our stories and build relationships with our consumers.
The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing Part 2
- April 28, 2010
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As social media moves from the edge to the center of adoption and practice, the future of marketing hinges on the ability for brands to evolve from the broadcasting of one-to-many sales and marketing messages to an authentic media company that creates and publishes meaningful and timely content. In Part 1, we examined the idea that every company is a media company: EC=MC, the various forms of pervasive media in the social Web, the need for editorial calendars, and how through the creation and proliferation of social objects, businesses could earn awareness and presence.
In this Part 2, we’ll now examine the infrastructure necessary to create a fully-functional media team and channel and also how to optimize social objects to dramatically increase findability and shareability.
Introducing the New CEO
Editorial Calendars and bringing them to life are uncommon today, but necessary to compete for the present and the future. Decision makers in every business, from entrepreneurs to local business owners to executives at enterprise organization are learning to appreciate the prospectus of social media and its promise to materialize a brighter, more interactive and customer-focused future. Very few however, create the change necessary to support the establishment of new media programming and perhaps more significantly, do not endorse or lead the humanization of the company and its culture. Again, actions speak louder than words; that’s why we need a little less conversation and a little more action.
Obviously the creation of new roles and the support of new programs is far easier with access to an unlimited fountain of resources. Whether we realize it or not however, we do have access to capabilities in house or within reach. Marketing, communications, and PR already produce and distribute content today. And, while their content is driven by top-down, messaging rich content blasted towards markets through one-to-many cannons, they are merely performing as instructed and remunerated.
Many of these departments or those individuals performing one or many of the above, report to a conductor responsible for the performances of the many instruments that form the brand’s orchestra. Whether it’s the president or founder, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, everything they know about content production and distribution works against the laws and virtues that vivify social networks.
Therefore, I suggest the creation of a new role or at least the introduction of new insight and responsibilities within existing roles that resemble the role of Editor-in-Chiefs within today’s traditional media hierarchies. The new CEO is for all intents and purposes a Chief Editorial Officer and is responsible for the timely creation and distribution for relevant and material content delivered as attractive and engaging social objects. Once social objects are introduced into the wild, businesses are then challenged to ensure that these objects are supported by representatives who will spur conversations and reactions as well as implementing Social Media Optimization (SMO) techniques to ensure their “findability” when consumers are searching for relevant information.
When the right person is not on staff or readily accessible through existing vendor networks, Ike Pigott offers a compelling option worthy of consideration. As the axe swings vigilantly at all media properties affected by the evolution of journalism and the finances and systems that support it, rampant cutbacks set the stage for new opportunities. Perhaps placing a bona fide editor or publisher in the role of newly created Chief Editorial Officer or Editor-in-Chief role would transform the elusive into something tangible and actionable.
Optimizing Social Objects
As alluded to earlier, Social Objects inherently possess the capacity to represent our brand mission and purpose even in the absence of brand ambassadors. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a derivative of the more extensive discipline of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. The saying goes, “if it can be searched, it can be optimized.” And, such is true for social objects. When placed in social networks such as YouTube, Flickr, blog posts, etc., these objects are contenders for the top of results pages that are generated for each search query. SMO optimizes social objects so that they appear when relevant or coveted keywords are used to seek relevant information.
SMO is defined by the distribution of social objects and their ability to rise to the top of any related search query, where and when its performed. SEO SMO = Amplified findability in the traditional and social Web.
However, the technicalities involved with wiring SEO are not the same processes required to boost visibility in social networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s in social networks like these where people are increasingly spending time communicating, finding relevant and interesting content, and sharing it with their connections. So now, in addition to SEO, we have to implement and manage a SMO program around our content to increase visibility in these new environments.
At the center of any successful SMO program are social objects. Social objects represent the content we create in social media, including images, videos, blog posts, comments, status updates, wall posts, and all other social activity that sparks the potential for online conversations. As such, the goal of SMO is to boost the visibility of social objects as a means to connecting with individuals who are proactively seeking additional information and direction.
The Social Web relies on metadata, leveraging “the crowds” to classify and organize the volumes of user-generated content uploaded to social networks and blogs everywhere. In some ways, we became the web’s librarians by indexing the volumes of useful social objects to help others discover them quickly and easily.
At the very least, social objects are contextualized through keywords, titles, descriptions, and/or tags.
Keywords
Keywords are the terms that people use to find relevant information in searches. When selecting keywords for your social objects, it’s important to remember that the keywords used by customers and influencers are not always what you think they’d be. To help, I suggest visiting Google Adwords to generate keyword ideas:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
It’s also important to use Web analytics on your Website or blog to see how people are phrasing searches to arrive at your site. This allows you to calibrate your keywords accordingly.
Titles
Titles refer to the official designation or name of your content. Instead of focusing on a sensational or controversial title as in other forms of marketing, headlines on the social web should feature title tags and keywords upfront. In Social Media, your headline must contain the keywords that explicitly match the search patterns of the people you hope to reach.
Descriptions
Descriptions further refine the context of your social object to entice visitors to view and circulate your content amongst their social graph.
The description field is your chance to frame an object in order to further convince the viewer to click through to it. A good rule of thumb when writing descriptions is to make sure that your copy includes at least three keywords related to your business/brand and target viewers – without reading as text explicitly written to manipulate search results.
Tags
Tags are keywords that further group and organize your Social Object within the social network.
Tags are based on folksonomy, a system of classification derived from the practice of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content within specific networks. In order to make sure that your tags are categorized most effectively, make sure they include keywords related to the branding and marketing of your product, as well as its competition.
Links
Links are the currency of the Web and serve as the primary undercurrent of search engine optimization. As in SEO, links help fuel traffic (as measured in views) to your social object, and contribute to your ranking within initial search results. Links equate to authority, and by amassing an extensive inbound linking infrastructure, the visibility of your social object can earn significant inertia. This, in turn, allows it to traverse from resident social network searches to appear in matching results in traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
For example, sharing a link on Twitter and Facebook that points back to a video on YouTube extends the reach of the video to people in one or more forums, potentially connecting them to your content. If individuals within these outside social networks decide to share the video across their social graphs, we further extend the visibility and the authority of each object.
From “Sales Rhetoric and Messages” to Influence
No brand is an island and the idea of our Web properties serving as destinations is quite honestly dated and no longer effective. As many online activities begin with a search, creating and deploying strategic beacons of information within targeted social networks creates roads and bridges back to our business.
This “inbound” form of unmarketing, enriched through the production of meaningful content, helps us connect our value and our story to those who are already searching for solutions and guidance. We’re either part of the results or we’re unfortunately absent from further consideration.
Our road to the future begins with understanding that attention is finite and is increasingly thinning. It is now our responsibility to connect purpose and value directly with individuals where, when, and how their attention is focused. We must help ourselves by introducing relevance, discoverability, and shareability into the mix. Empowering consumers to view the most material information and in turn, make advantageous decisions is now a critical priority and will determine our stature not only in online societies, but also in the markets where we hope to thrive and excel. We are either part of the information gathering and decision making cycles or we are absent from them. Where we rank once connected is established by our understanding of people and the information they seek combined with our mastery of the networks, tools, and services they use to communicate. It’s as simple as this: absence equates to irrelevance while pervasiveness equates to ubiquity. And, through the creation of compelling media, we earn the presence, awareness and ultimately the influence we deserve.
Engage or Die!
Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my new book, Engage!
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Image Credit: ShutterstockArticle originally posted at HubSpot
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via briansolis.com
‘Mad Men’ Haven’t Changed Much Since The 1960s : NPR
via npr.org
Listen to the story
The hit television show Mad Men depicts the 1960s advertising world of Madison Avenue in a way that is pretty close to reality: very white and very male.
Half a century later, three-martini lunches and chain smoking in the office are long gone. But when it comes to diversity in the agency, not much has changed.
Right Place, Right Time, Right Color
At 43, John Osborn is at the top of his game.
In 1991, when he was a rookie at the big ad agency BBDO, he worked on a memorable television ad for Pepsi, featuring Ray Charles. From there, he rose quickly through the ranks, and now runs BBDO New York.
Read More
Is it time for the Rooney Rule for ad agencies and other media companies?