The Trojan Horse social media marketing strategy
Feb 8th
The Greek tale of the Trojan Horse is among the most well-known stories in history.
After an unsuccessful 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a group of brave soldiers inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night.
The Trojans received a thoughtful departing gift but there was surprise inside wasn’t there?
While I can’t promise the dominance of a nation (or even Facebook), there is a similar opportunity for marketers today — give people a gift with a little surprise inside. There are three examples that come to mind — perhaps you can name more …
Badges — My oh my bloggers love badges. I have a few of them on {grow} that I wear with pride, especially if it represents praise from judges or my readers like the Content Marketing Institute Award for being one of the Top 10 Content Marketing blogs in the world. So my prize was a badge … but there’s a surprise inside! That badge links to the CMI website and creates a powerful Search Engine Optimization benefit. It’s almost like I added them to a blog roll. They have a semi-permanent advertisement on my blog. Pretty clever, huh?
Guest posts – I like to shine a light on deserving writers and thinkers in the {grow} community by inviting occasional guest posts. This is obviously great exposure, but if the writer is clever (and they are), they can also create links within a guest post to other posts and web destinations that will benefit their business. A gift to me? Sure? But those links are like soldiers leaping out of the horse to drive traffic to their website!
Comments – Even the humble blog comment can have have a traffic-driving strategy behind it. If you’ve written a post that complements something I’ve written, why not put a link to it in a comment? I consider every comment a gift, but it can also open up opportunities for you. Comments are scanned by search engines, and associating a link with a popular blog article can’t hurt. Even uber-blogger Brian Solis recently got into the act when he had his own linkbait beach party on my blog. He left the most link-filled comment in the history of mankind — 11 links in a single comment (right). Was he being authentically helpful? Probably. But folks … he sure did drag one big Trojan Horse on to the blog!
Here’s the key to success in executing a Trojan Horse strategy — if it appears like you’re gaming the system or being inauthentic in any way, you will be sniffed out and booted, most likely. Like all aspects of the social web, people still want real value in content and connections.
If you leave a legitimate comment with a meaningful link to explain your position, I respect that. It adds value for everyone involved. By the way, I’ve had about 8,000 comments on {grow}. I’ve deleted TWO as being inappropriate.
So I’ve provided three examples of this strategy. Can you think of other ideas of how this might work? Does this strategy make sense to you?
I’ll be discussing this idea and dozens more in a free Feb. 16 MLT Creative webinar, Elevating your Blog: Content, Conversions and Content.
Confessions of a smartphone douchebag
Feb 6th
I have developed a twitch.
I can’t go more than 15 minutes without reaching into my pocket, pulling out my smartphone and checking in with the torrent of communications coming at me through email, the social web and my blog.
It’s at the point where this has become an involuntary reflex like a breath or a heart beat. It happens on a regular pace, without planning or thought. It is outside of my awareness, like a blink.
And it’s become a problem. This week I was at dinner with friends and realized I had tuned out the conversation and was immersed in my phone. I felt embarrassed because I knew how rude this must have seemed but I didn’t even remember pulling the device out. And while I can occasionally fake through an episode of “Geez, these clients are demanding,” in truth, I could just as likely have been checking into Foursquare.
I have become a smartphone douchbag.
How did this happen?
I know I’m not alone in this experience, but as I reflect, I think there are two forces that have conditioned this new behavior.
I’ve always been a hard-worker, but even a few years ago, I could still dis-engage unless I had a laptop and an Ethernet connection. Now, work follows me like air.
Second, the torrent of communications can be overwhelming. 150 emails a day. 300 Twitter mentions. Dozens of LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube requests. All good stuff, but if I let my guard down for even half a day, I am in a deep hole, so I just keep on shoveling, shoveling, shoveling a little bit at a time.
I’m not meaning for this to be a personal whiny-boy session because I know I make my own choices in life but I also sense this is happening to a lot of other people. It’s even creeping into academic research and some are worried that the ubiquitous electronic connections we maintain may be weakening family ties.
Social psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University is among those studying our relationship with technology. “At any moment, you’re dividing your attention between the person in front of you and the person you’re giving snippets of information to. We don’t know the net consequence of reducing the quality of the relationship a little bit with the person you’re with while improving or maintaining it with the person you’re electronically tied to.”
The fact is, when I twitch and pull out my iPhone at a family dinner, I am sending a message: “Excuse me, but there is someone I’d rather be interacting with than you.” Awful.
The problem becomes magnified because I’m not the only one at the table with the twitch. My kids can be even worse. And while I may KNOW I’m jeopardizing human relationships, I’m not sure they do. The world of disconnected, heads-down, “thumb communication” is the preferred method of maintaining relationships for many teens. There is a wide generational communication gap emerging, but that is another blog post entirely!
I am in a period of transition. I need to place limits on this thing … in effect, I need to parent myself. I am looking for ways to address the root causes — an inability to dis-engage without making the problems worse, and the pressure of constant communications.
But in the mean time, I would be so interested in your experiences with this dilemma. What are you experiencing and what is your strategy to deal with it? Are you a smartphone douchebag?
Will paid Spam Squads make Google irrelevant?
Feb 5th
My friend Helen Brown wrote this thought-provoking post on her blog, “The Intelligent Edge” and graciously allowed me to reprint it on {grow} …
The Washington Post ran an article a few days ago exposing some shocking developments about spam and Google. Spammers are perfecting ways to cheat the Google system and are bringing it directly to you and me. It’s clogging up the works and many are starting to worry that Google isn’t taking the issue seriously enough.
How the spammers do it
1. Content farms – Businesses created specifically to generate cheap and filling answers to popular search strings – are increasingly padding out the results.
According to the article’s author, Michael Rosenwald, websites like eHow hire freelancers to write how-to articles on a wide variety of topics. The sites work hard to optimize the page content so that they get pushed to the top of search results. And because we trust Google’s algorithms to give us good hits, we click the link. And when we click the link, we’ve reinforced to Google that that link is what we’re looking for – Google ranks web pages in part based on how many click-throughs it gets. Once we actually see the page, we realize it’s hooey, but now we’re there, we’ve committed. We’ve clicked. Crap.
2. Nickel-a-clickers – People who are paid to click links to bring a web page higher in the rankings.
Through employment matchup services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, spammers hire cheap labor to click on links in order to make their site seem more relevant. Every time the clickers click they get five cents, or whatever the agreed-on rate is. In order to earn a decent return, they have to click a lot of hotlinks. I can’t imagine the boredom that entails, but I suppose it’s pretty easy work.
I’d never heard of Mechanical Turk, so I thought I’d have a look-see. One of the jobs on offer: “CopyEditing and Logically Filling up of Blanks for Recipe Database.” Job description: “Check for grammer errors.” Oh good. Final comment on the job from the employer: “It doesn’t have to be factually correct. As long as the details seems plausible and logical it is fine.” Well, there’s another reason for sticking with reliable ol’ Epicurious.
Big deal, there’s more spam in Google results. Whatever.
You might say that now, but if spammers are enlisting armies of cheap labor to scam the system, Google’s in big trouble. Because if we all get fed up, there are several other big engines ready and waiting for the influx of search émigrés. And Google will be another name like Netscape or Northern Light that you think “Oh yeah! I used to use that all the time!”
And it means trouble for us, too, because some of the pages you click through to are going have more and more distasteful things on them. And like bedbugs they could start creeping onto your hard drive and lurk there.
Lurking things? Eww. Are there options?
Alternatives to Google include Bing, Blekko, and Exalead, just to name a few. At my company, The Helen Brown Group, we heavily rely on these sites for our research and we check more than one search engine for every query we do. You might want to consider making it a habit too, if you aren’t already.
Here’s another reason why you might want to use more than one engine: studies in recent years by researchers at Penn State, the University of Kashmir, metasearch engine Dogpile and others have shown repeatedly that information overlap between search engines is very low, sometimes as little as 1% in the first page of returned results. You get a stronger variety of results if you cast your net wider.
An interesting sidenote — search guru Danny Sullivan posted an article on the Search Engine Land website yesterday titled “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.” Apparently Google set up a sting operation recently to prove that Bing has been lurking over their shoulders and copying search results. Sullivan’s article has pictorial evidence and everything. Will Bing just clone Google’s results, spam and all? I sure hope not.
Finally, consider this: when you search Google or any search engine, you’re looking at a static database of web pages that were scanned in days, weeks or perhaps even months ago. Which is why sometimes when you click a link you won’t find the word you were looking for. The page was updated in the interim between when it was saved in the search engine’s database and when you clicked the link. One search engine may have cataloged a site yesterday and another last month. Or last year. For freshness, reliability and completeness, it just pays to use more than one search engine.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google. But this spam thing is starting to bug me. Are you concerned? Or is this much ado about nothing?
Helen Brown is founder of The Helen Brown Group and ShareTraining, These companies provide research and support for non-profit fund-raising efforts around the world. Follow her on Twitter and her blog.
Case study: Fast-growing B2B expands social media exposure
Feb 4th
Drew Hawkins has become one of the most consistent contributors in the {grow} community. He recently commented that he could relate to the research on the explosive growth of social media in small businesses because he was witnessing it first hand. I invited him to share his inspiring success story …
When I started at Hinda Incentives in 2009, we had very little digital marketing efforts outside of a website and a Google AdWords account. Since that time, we’ve established a presence on multiple social marketing channels and positioned ourselves as an industry leader in the social space. Within that time frame, we were listed on the Inc. magazine list of the Fastest Growing Companies, Crain’s Chicago Fast Fifty roster, and are among the finalists for a B2B Twitterer of the Year award. Our social media growth has paralleled the rapid financial growth of our company.
How did we get to where we are today and what are the results?
Setting Our Own Table
One of the overused phrases in social media marketing is “joining the conversation.” Hinda is an established player in the incentive and recognition industry. Our first research objective was to pinpoint where our audience was hanging out and what was being said about incentives. To our disappointment, there wasn’t much of a conversation about the subject outside of a couple of key influencers.
Many see this as a roadblock to social media, but we saw this as an opportunity. Since we couldn’t get invited to the conversation table about recognition programs, we set our own table. After building online relationships with a couple of those key influencers through blog commenting and Twitter conversations, we began to build our own community around the strategies of recognition and loyalty programs — with Hinda’s name attached to the dialogue.
B2B Social Media…Where to Engage?
Our social strategy boiled down to one goal: Drive traffic to our website — our largest source of lead generation. If organic search and an AdWords account were creating opportunities, we figured social media would amplify that traffic. Our theory was, if people liked what we had to say in our social outlets, they would be more likely to visit our website.
B2B social media is still uncharted territory, so we narrowed our “voice options” down to a few select channels. Our emphasis went toward content development for our blog. We generated traffic to our blog using Twitter and LinkedIn, and some relevant, B2B-friendly networks. Our blog showcased our expertise while Twitter and LinkedIn helped “humanize” our company brand. All of those channels would provide direct links to our home site, improve Search Engine Optimization, and enable our community to learn more about us.
The Results
- Our Twitter community of targeted customers has grown steadily (doubling in six months), as has our LinkedIn following. Our conversations on Twitter established relationships for significant sales leads while the lead quality generated from the new social website traffic has measurably improved over the last year.
- Our blog traffic took off quickly and we already receive 1,000 visits a month with subscribers from at least 30 different customers. In this short time our social presence has increased that valuable traffic to our website by about 15 percent. This has been powerful — just in the last week we received a few hundred thousand dollars in sales opportunities through this advantage.
- The blog has proven to be a valuable piece of social media real estate. We don’t just regurgitate the same concepts over and over. Our posts tie recognition and loyalty programs to hot topics such as social gaming, consumer electronic trends and pop culture.
- Our blog also served as a crucial PR tool last year when a major competitor pulled out of our industry. Many in our industry turned to what we said in our blog to learn our official position on the situation, and this was picked up and quoted by other blogs, reinforcing our position as the voice of authority in our industry.
- We still have a long way to go, but already LinkedIn and our blog have become the number 2 and 3 sources of web traffic to our site, after organic search. With this initial success we have earned the right to grow our social marketing efforts. When our website overhaul is completed in a month, we look to boost sales leads further by making our site even more “social.”
Lessons Learned
Social Takes Time: Unless you are a well-known brand, establishing a social presence takes time. We’ve been working for over a year and a half on our efforts and are just now reaping the benefits. There was a time when our posts and tweets were met by cricket chirps – as if nobody was listening. The key for us was to keep digging in and build an audience. When our competitors finally got to the social scene, we already had a big lead.
Quality Over Quantity: We knew from the beginning that we weren’t aiming to be a company with two million followers. While audience size is important, we seek a small yet engaged audience. So far that strategy is paying off. Our audience is actively referring clients to us, spreading our brand message and even making a point to seek us out at trade shows to meet with us in person. We’ve learned that there’s more to social media than just having a ton of followers. It’s converting to meaningful relationships that counts.
Plan Before You Act: Flying by the seat of your pants in social media isn’t strategy – it’s luck. Before starting anything, you should research who you need to target, where they hang out online and what they talk about. We wouldn’t be where we are today without steady planning and analysis.
We’ve had a lot of fun in the digital space and are constantly learning ways to improve. We never settle. Good digital marketing, or any marketing, is a constant learning and re-evaluation process.
I hope this has been interesting for you. What are your key take-aways from what we’ve done so far? How can we improve?
Drew Hawkins is a Marketing Coordinator for Hinda Incentives. You can find him through his personal blog (Brain Wads) or @drewhawkins on Twitter. You can connect with Hinda as well through their blog, YouTube channel or Twitter.
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