What is it?

From a technology standpoint, the Facebook “Like” button is part of a larger technology initiative called the Open Graph Protocol or Open Graph API.  The platform is an upgrade to last year’s Open Graph announcements. It also replaces the “Fan” button with the “Like” button.

The new protocols will not only allow organizations to have all the features currently found on their Facebook pages page such as being able to “Fan” or now “Like” the organization, allowing that action to show up on people’s profiles, publish that action across their friend’s newsfeeds, but will allow Facebook to start building massive amounts of data on how Facebook users interact with sites within and beyond the Facebook walls.

Simply put the “Like” button and Open Graph Protocol will allow Facebook and organizations to understand web users’ habits across the larger web. They want to build not only a social, but personalized web whose hub is Facebook.

Organizations will be able to find out what users like, what they do not like, what their friends and connections like and then tailor a user’s site experience to that data. They can leverage this platform to make their websites more personalized based on site visitor’s Facebook profiles and actions within Facebook and outside the walls of the social network by utilizing data from sites that also adopt the Open Graph Protocol.

One of the earliest integrations of the new protocols is Levi’s ecommerce site http://store.levi.com/. You can now see the products that Facebook users like and what your friends’ like. Based on your interactions on the site, Levi’s can also provide targeted and personalized recommendations for different products.

Why it matters:

1. Facebook is the most used social network by monthly active users. With just under half a billion users, Facebook boasts the largest active user base of any US-based social network. Need some perspective on that number? If Facebook was a country, it would be the third-largest behind only India and China. Needless to say, it has the largest potential reach of any social network for your brand to connect with consumers.
2. Facebook could be the key to building the true semantic web. Due to the number of users and the ability for Facebook to collect data from its and any site that implements the Open Graph protocols, Facebook is potentially becoming the hub of the semantic web. By semantic web, we are referring to the idea of building a web ecosystem where a user’s needs can be anticipated, understood and personalized for them. Think of demographic or geographic targeting on other sites such as Google, but take it to the next level, where a website understands what you and your network likes, does not like, buys, reads etc, and then personalizes your experience around that data.
3. The growth and data provided by the Open Graph is already massive. The new Open Graph Protocols were announced less than a week ago and already some 50,000 sites have implemented it and Facebook is seeing over 1 billion “Likes” per day.

Privacy Concerns:

The greatest concern is privacy. Facebook has not effectively promoted exactly what these changes mean for users, at least not in terms that the average Facebook user understands. The Open Graph Protocol allows third-parties to access most, if not all, of any Facebook user’s data as long as they are opted into the program through their security settings. It’s important to note that all users were automatically opted into the Open Graph Protocol.

How your organization can use it:

1. Site registration using Facebook. Similar to how Facebook Connect allowed websites to register and sign-on utilizing their Facebook account, sites can even more easily integrate Facebook’s authentication features to allow users to register for your site. Websites can access a Facebook users real name, email address, profile picture and list of friends. This sign up functionality can either replace or supplement your current system and can help increase user signups and improve the quality of user data.
2. Interaction and Engagement. With new features such as the “Like” button and additional sharing features, websites can now engage with visitors in deep ways such as what the larger Facebook community likes on your site or what friends of specific users like. This will help create engaging and meaningful experiences for Facebook users.
3. Syndication beyond the walls of Facebook. Websites that incorporate the “Like” features across different pieces of content—such as articles, images, products, etc.—will allow site visitors to easily spread that content across Facebook and web.

All of these opportunities can ultimately help increase the viral potential of your content. To further illustrate the process, click on the image below which will bring up a larger image to illustrate the “like” process.

- Michael

DISCOUNT CODE: If you are interested in watching this Webinar, we have a code for $10 off the registration cost of $39/person. Simply register online and use this code “SKaufmann” in the promo code field, which will give you $10 off when you check out.

WHEN: April 28, 2010 1pm PDT / 3pm CDT / 4pm EDT
WEBINAR TOPICS:

• A discussion on campaign setup strategies
• Keyword research and selection process: short vs. long tail terms
• Insights on bidding strategies
• A review campaign efficiency tools
• Notes on post-click experience testing and metrics

Let me illustrate with a true story. We have a client whose competitor spent quite a bit on a radio promotion. These ads had a call-to-action that drove people to the web. When it comes to radio commercials, as it would happen, consumers do one of two things: 1) they remember the brand name of the company running the radio commercial, but don’t know the URL so they search for it in a search engine, or 2) they can’t remember the brand name, but remember something about the brand or product, so they search for whatever they remember.

So what if you set up a campaign and targeted the competing product name, as well as the competitors frequently searched related keywords? Well, we did. When a consumer did a search after hearing the radio commercial, they would see our client’s ad on top of the search results. We ended up getting traffic that came from another promotion, saw our client’s ads and got interested. We also earned thousands of impressions, each of which is an opportunity to build our client’s brand in the mind of a consumer who is actively engaged in the research phase, looking for a product our client sells. This is about as good as it gets when it comes to branding. Maybe they click on our ad and visit our client’s website and make a sale – great. Maybe they just see our client’s ad, near the top of the search results page when searching for a competing product – also great.

This is just one example of when it can pay to use PPC to build a brand. Hang in there for another few lines and I’ll explain a few more.

Reasons
• Competitor names and products – If you’ve ever been involved in a competitive speed sport such as running, cycling or car racing, you may have heard of the concept of “drafting”. This is concept of aerodynamics where one competitor takes a position directly behind another to allow the front competitor to break the air resistance. The spot directly behind the front competitor will be in the slipstream of the leader, which allows the follower to observe less wind resistance, allowing the “drafter” to conserve energy, build speed and more easily shoot past the competitor in the front. The concept of utilizing the leader’s energy for your gain also applies to marketing. As illustrated in the original example, there is a great opportunity to attain brand recognition and association within a specific marketplace. Often you can “draft” your competitor, thereby gaining advantage from their larger budget and offline promotions.

• Synergy with organic optimization – So your brand comes up on top for your name in the organic search results. Perfect. But what about all the competing messages on that page, and ads from your competitors? There are plenty of studies that have shown that you will often achieve a higher click-through-rate when your PPC ad is shown along with your organic listing, for both products and your brand name. But be careful, sometimes this can have a cannibalistic effect, and you should look for the net ROI change to make sure this isn’t happening in your instance. Here’s a great article about how to measure to make sure you are not cannibalizing your SEO results.

• Supporting offline campaigns – Using PPC to support an offline campaign is a great way to use PPC to build your brand. When you are running an offline promotion, whether PR, TV, Radio, Print or even a social campaign, it’s important to have PPC ads in place to support whatever your potential customers might be searching. This is your opportunity to associate your brand or product with their search. However, keep in mind that your competitors have the opportunity to “draft” by utilizing some of your offline campaigns to attain additional traffic and brand building. Bottom line, just be aware of this activity and don’t leave this gap open for your competitors to steal your mojo.

• Bidding for brand names, products, tag lines and associated keyword phrases – If you don’t have the top organic listing this is particularly important. It’s a good idea to associate your brand with the consumers’ search phrases, particularly when those phrases cover your industry or product. When the consumer is searching for a tag line that you are using, or hoping to use in the future, this is also your opportunity to further associate your brand with this tag line.

• Misspellings – It always amazes me when I do a search for a company and spell it wrong. Frequently the company website will not come up high in organic listings, and even worse, they won’t have a PPC ad waiting there for me. This is an opportunity to correct a brand mistake, build your correct brand name (spelling) and to direct a nearly lost customer to your web property. And best yet, more often than not, the cost for these PPC clicks is very low.

There are many more strategies to employ, but these should be a few good ones to consider when developing your paid search campaign strategy. Here are a few tips to remember when running a PPC campaign for Brand Building purposes.

• Make sure the keyword(s) you are bidding on are featured on the landing page(s) to which you are sending consumers. This will help keep PPC bid costs down by increasing quality scores, and will also help increase conversion when consumers get to your landing page.

• Make sure to show your brand or product name clearly in ad copy – too often I see ads that would be great branding ads, yet they lack a clear brand name and message. Don’t forget the most important thing in building a brand is… the brand.

• Make sure to put the brand name in the display URL – again, it’s critical to show to help reinforce the credibility of your brand name by showing it again in the URL.

• Make sure to bid aggressively enough to get a top spot – sometimes when you are running a campaign for the purpose of generating sales and ROI, the 3rd or 4th spot might generate the best return on your investment. When you are building your brand, this is a different story. If your ad falls in the 9th position on the bottom of a page of PPC ads, you will not be seen as a leader in the category that the consumer is researching…if your ad is seen at all.

• Don’t forget the content network – if the purpose of building your brand is to associate it with a specific need/category/product in the consumers mind, the content network does just this. It shows your ad next to an article discussing a particular topic that is relevant to the keyword you have bid on. It’s not perfect, true, but it will certainly get you a great number of brand-building impressions for a low cost.

While PPC is often one of the most cost efficient ways to drive direct sales, don’t forget the value of building a brand through paid search. In a world where you, and your client, could use every advantage possible, this is yet another powerful way to realize great gains with little expense.

Love the idea? Hate it? Feel free to shoot me an email, or discuss below.

1. Fill out your personal profile. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities. The easier you are to find the more connections you can make and the more chance you have of finding that key contact.
2. Link to your personal profile. Include a link to your profile as part of an email signature; the benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials.
3. Let your profile help with SEO. LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View”. Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name.
4. Join industry groups. Search for and join industry-related LinkedIn groups , even if there is no activity within them. The icons for those groups will show up on your profile which tells people at a glance that you are involved in your industry and presumably knowledgeable about it. It also creates a connection between you and anyone else who is a member of that group. If the group is active, join in the conversation where appropriate. This is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise.
5. Post news. Many groups allow you to post links to news articles intended to spark conversation. More often than not, conversations do not arise from these links but that doesn’t mean that no one pays attention to them. Like status updates, this function can be used to position yourself as knowledgeable in your field. But think before you go down this route. Before you post anything, ask yourself if what you’re about to share is truly valuable to the group.
6. Pose questions on “LinkedIn Answers”. If you want to make connections with a specific type of person, you can use LinkedIn’s Answer feature to try and attract them by posing a question the LinkedIn audience. Think about the type of person you want to reach and then formulate a question for which you think that person would have an opinion about that they’d like to share. LinkedIn ‘Answers’ is a great way to engage the sorts of people you want to begin a dialogue with.
7. Answer questions on “LinkedIn Answers”. Answer questions posed by others. This, again, is another aspect of LinkedIn that can be used to demonstrate your competence. Only answer the questions for which you know the answer intimately. If you are truly helpful to the person, they’ll consider assigning you as the best answer among the group. Your answer but also the fact that it was the best answer will be displayed on your profile. With this method you can both demonstrate your, and by extension your company’s, expertise but most importantly it provides you an opportunity to engage the question asker (someone clearly interested in the area you’ve just demonstrated your knowledge in) AND any and all people who read the question and your subsequent answer.LinkedIn Answers: http://www.linkedin.com/answers
   LinkedIn Groups Directory: http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory

If you have other great ideas, please share them in the comments below, or email them to us and we’ll post them here for the benefit of the community.

1. Competitors
In many cases a few industry leaders will dominate a web space. If you are starting a new website, or simply trying to topple a giant, you need to be aware of what the competition is doing well, and what it is not. Often the highest traffic keywords will have a group of 5 to 10 major competitors competing for them. In many industries, the large players will either have full-time SEO staff or will have SEO agencies on retainer, performing intensive organic search optimization. This can make it a time intensive and costly proposition to try to “dethrone” one or more of the leaders by getting a top 5 ranking in Google for a highly competitive keyword. To circumvent this problem, it’s often a good idea to start with a ranking analysis of your competitors. Determine what keywords they are ranking well for, and which ones they are not ranking well for. This will indicate areas of great opportunity for organic optimization. From there, spend time optimizing the keywords your competitors are not ranking well for. This will give you the advantage in niche areas where your website can be a leader.

2. Excessive Optimization
Excessive optimization, often called “keyword stuffing” is just as detrimental in 2010 as it was in 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. People often ask me “what is the percentage of keywords” or “keyword density” that you can have on a page before the page should be considered “stuffed”. While we utilize a simple formula at Lucid Agency to give a general barometer, to be honest, it’s just as easy to follow this simple rule of thumb. If you can read a page and not tell that it is written for SEO purposes, and it sounds informative and readable for humans, then chances are it is not over-optimized. For example, did you realize that this section is optimized for “excessive optimization”? Probably not, because it was written to be informative and just happens to contain that keyword two times. Organic search rankings are intended to list the most useful and credible websites at the top of the list, so write with that objective in mind.

3. Not Utilizing Social Media in SEO Strategy
Social media is a great way to garner both traffic and inbound links, both of which are helpful for the objective of SEO – getting more qualified traffic to your website. While many search engine optimization strategies focus on the on-page and off-page elements of organic optimization, they often neglect social media. There are simple ways to utilize social media in search. A simple way to start is with a blog and a twitter account. Write a few good blog posts on topics relevant to your industry of expertise, providing useful information. These articles could be articles, picture posts, videos, interviews, white papers; really anything that your intended reader would find useful. Submit these blog posts via XML sitemap to the search engines. Then utilize a following of those interested in what you have to say on Twitter, and put up teasers to your blog posts. If you do this well, with any luck, some of your followers will put up links to your blog on their websites and blogs, gaining you both direct traffic from their reads, and also in bound links from their web properties.

4. Lack of Original Content
As they say in the world of search engine optimization, “content is king”. This has been the rule for many years, and is likely to prevail as one of the foremost guidelines in SEO. Search engines like content that is unique and new. And they like a lot of it. So just create a lot of good content and you’ll end up working wonders for your SEO campaign. If possible, lightly optimize this content and let the rest take care of itself.

5. Lack of Quality Links
Nothing new here…links are the foundation of the Google algorithm and what originally separated them from the other search engines. If you consider Google a great “democracy” of sorts, and each link from a credible website as a “vote” for your website, then it’s simple to see that he with a lot of votes and a clear, in-depth message shall be the winner. Recently, other search engines have followed suit, and it’s no longer just Google valuing these links, but the other search engines as well. In addition, it’s also important to make sure you have links from many websites and that the websites are credible (not link farms). Further, there is some value to the outbound links on your website. When it comes to outbound links, search engines like to see a few links to valuable and related websites.

6. Slow Page Load Times
From many accounts, the new algorithm Google released last year, fondly named “caffeine”, we noticed an importance placed on page load times. This makes sense. If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and provide the best results to those searchers looking for this information, they wouldn’t be doing a great job if the top ranking websites loaded very slowly, or didn’t load at all – thus providing a terrible experience to searchers. To remedy slow load times, try cleaning up code, taking out extraneous flash or third party loading galleries. If this doesn’t help, try a “fresh rebuild”, i.e. having a developer go through and rebuild the website in nice clean new code.

7. Website Structure Issues
If your website has a complicated or unintuitive directory structure, you may want to think about redoing it. The directory structures that work best for top organic rankings are the ones that are simple and intuitive, as this will help search engines and website visitors identify where in the website they are. Search engines use a directory structure to try and determine a relationship between different categorical items and pages on your website. If your structure makes no sense, it can only be detrimental for your rankings, and often the user as well. Fortunately, this is easy to fix up-front, and if you have a website running on a popular CMS platform such as WordPress or Expression Engine, there are many free plugins you can get to quickly and easily adjust the directory structure of your website. If you have a website that sells products for the construction industry, you might have a directory structure like ##www.plumbing-co.com/supplies/welding-supplies.html##, where you would list all of your welding supplies, which would be clear to both search engines and users alike.

8. Inaccurate or Duplicate Page Titles
Search engines give significant weight to website pages that are clear in their content focus. Titles are one of the best ways to indicate the intended focus of a website page. It is a best practice to include a unique, descriptive and lightly optimized title for your website pages. Don’t utilize keywords that are not relevant to the content of the web page, just write something that is useful and accurate, and if it can include the keyword then perfect. Remember titles are shown in search engine listings, so you want your title to be informative and compelling. After all, you are not only trying to get the top listing in Google, but you want people to click on your listing as well.

9. Missing XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are a very simple way to make sure websites with many pages, and frequently changing content, are thoroughly and accurately indexed by search engines. Since search engines love fresh content, it is advantageous to make sure your website utilizes an XML sitemap, to ensure your “fresh” content is found and indexed quickly. XML sitemaps are simple to make and most web developers can implement them quickly.

10. New Websites
If you work in the SEO field, you’ve most likely had more than one potential client come to you with little more than a checkbook and a domain name. Often this potential client will want to “rank number 1 in Google” for their keyword-de-jour. While most agencies will gladly develop a plan to accomplish this, one of the largest barriers is something that cannot be fixed with any amount of money. Google and Bing (MSN and soon-to-be Yahoo) value the length of time a domain has been in existence. This is something often referred to in SEO slang as “the sandbox”. According to many industry experts Google reportedly puts new websites in something of a sandbox for a while, in an attempt to thwart large scale link efforts for new websites. While this is more theory than fact, Google engineer Matt Cutts has said that there are elements of the Google algorithm that may have an effect such as what has been described as the sandbox. What we can tell you is that we’ve noticed it certainly takes a little longer to get rankings for a new website than an older website. This is partially because of the generally lower number of existing links going to new websites, as well as the variety of other issues that are usually present with many new websites. To best counter this problem, get a new website up quickly, and slowly build up links to the website after the initial launch.

In closing, many of the issues hindering successful optimization aren’t particular difficult to solve, nor do they take a PHD in mathematics to figure out. Follow some simple tried and true optimization techniques, develop great content, get the word out, track your results and the rankings will take care of themselves.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/ (no account needed)

Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (you will need a Yahoo account to submit a site to Yahoo)

Bing (MSN): http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx (no account needed)

However, don’t go deleting your Meta Keywords just yet. This blog post by Randy Duermyer illustrates a test they did showing that Yahoo does utilize Meta Keywords currently in their algorithmic ranking. When the company doing the website removed the Meta Keywords from a website, the rankings in Yahoo dropped. When the Meta Keywords were restored, the rankings returned. Here is another article describing Yahoo and MSN using Meta Keywords.

While we have a lot to learn, we’ve learned quite a bit from the numerous social campaigns we’ve managed for our clients. One of the major findings is that social campaigns are unique. And I mean really unique. You can’t force a customer dialog if the customer doesn’t want to have one. The campaign must be both transparent and interesting enough to make a customer want to interact with your brand. The product, however, doesn’t have to be overly interesting, because most likely there are some people out there who are already fans of this product or brand, and the job of the social campaign is to unite these people and allow them to communicate directly with the brand.

And all of this has taught us a few things about measuring social. It’s tricky for sure. Each campaign is going to have a variety of stakeholders that will all care about different things. Some will care about fans and followers. Some will care about impressions. Some will care about clicks and interaction levels. Some will just care about direct purchase and lead acquisition. So…what is a marketer to do? We’re starting to work through this conversation with clients and help define a “path” of metrics to track. We are working a funnel process, or a customer purchase cycle, to identify clear and measurable points of interaction for the consumer during this campaign. This sounds easier than it is, because each business has a different understanding of their customer, and the purchase cycle, not to mention a different business need for running a social campaign in the first place.

For example, say a client is doing a social campaign to introduce a new tech product into the marketplace. Perhaps we’re holding a live world release and product demo on Ustream, and have held an event registration in Facebook. To promote this, we’ve built a twitter following based on a sneak peak photo opportunity campaign, and an event live-tweet road show. We’ve posted these pictures in a tagged Flickr and Photobucket account. We’ve ran connect based ads that are customized to users profiles in Facebook. We’ve ran ads based on job categories in LinkedIn. We’ve initiated a good forum discussion board and have seeded tech blogs with hot information releases. New product demo’s have been sent to leading bloggers and industry journalists. The campaign kicks off and it’s time to report the initial results. Ideally we’ve worked with the client ahead of time to identify a path to report along that makes decision making easy. Perhaps we’ve created a funnel reporting to identify:

1. Customer Awareness – Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, Ad Impressions, Blog Posts and Articles Written
2. Customer Engagement – Facebook Fan Interactions & Posts, Twitter Mentions & Retweets, Blog Comments, Article Comments and Reads, Photo Views
3. Customer Activity – Event Registrations, Demo Launch Views

The metric that we’re measuring changes as the campaign progresses, so naturally the reporting and focus should change as well.

So, bottom line, it’s a lot of work. But, when this is done correctly, we’re starting to see some unique findings. For one, clients are starting to enjoy their social campaigns. These campaigns are allowing them some artistic freedom, and a natural extension of what they do anyway. The clients are sometimes even becoming a bit more invigorated with their brand, almost as if learning more about it for the first time. And customers are responding. They are participating and asking questions. They are submitting information and scheduling events. They are event buying products and helping companies streamline R&D processes, through direct conversation and feedback.

Here’s an interesting article about how social media engagement levels are varied and should be looked at uniquely.

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