The result of both campaigns was massive brand exposure for both companies. So, mission accomplished?

Apple

Apple, well known for keeping details of new product launches under wraps until the Macworld event, this year decided to release upgraded hardware a couple of weeks prior to the event. More significantly, there was no major press launch, but instead small releases were made to key online news sites. These were picked up by the supporters of the Apple brand and very quickly spread across Twitter, blogs and other social networks. The response was positive - everybody was talking about Apple and the new releases, as well as the “quietness” (in traditional media terms) of the release. However, Apple had succeeded in leveraging the huge, loyal brand following they had within the social media space to spread the word for them, and the social media space was happy to oblige. An excellent example of low-cost marketing.

Skittles

Skittles, a type of sweet, decided to follow their marketing agency’s recommendation and completely removed their corporate site. Replacing it was an unfiltered Twitter search results page showing any tweet (post) that mentioned Skittles (or that contained the hash tag #skittles). A floating menu allowed visitors to access different social representations of the brand, including links to the “official” Skittles page on Wikipedia, their Facebook profile, YouTube videos, etc. The home page changes periodically and has been the Twitter search results, the Wikipedia page and is currently set to the YouTube video page.

The response to this change was picked up in earnest by the social networks, and while Skittles managed to create massive brand exposure and reach a wider audience more quickly, much of what was being said (or at least much of what I read when I checked out the story as it broke) was negatively aimed at “WhatTF” had they done and “WhyTF” had they listened to their agency. For about a week, Skittles gained massive exposure and even today, people like me are still writing about them and their Social Media Experiment.

Analysis

I think that Apple have very successfully engaged with social media in this instance, and while their implementation is not cutting edge (like Skittles) it perfectly demonstrates what can be achieved if you already have a strong brand following.

Skittles, on the other hand, have adopted a different strategy and tried to present a fusion of what the world thinks about them; however, the mashup was unrefined. They have tried to let the Internet tell you who and what they are instead of using  traditional in-house marketing materials. But, by replacing the product website with solely social media links, I believe they have removed part of the brand experience we still require. And that is a set of information about the company and the product that is more cohesively structured and easier to follow; you wouldn’t expect to get into your car and have to re-learn how to drive it every day, and the same is true when you visit a website.

When I visit a website for information about a specific product or service, I expect to be presented with a cohesive navigation system and a clear sense of where I am within the information that is being presented to me. Unfortunately, the Skittles experiment destroys this accepted paradigm since every page presented is structured differently, navigates differently and requires the reader to sift through information that, while interesting, is probably not relevant to the reason they came to the website. The result: no real clue about Skittles unless you are into social media already, and a potential loss of audience from “traditional” web surfers as they have their own personal “WTF” moment when they visit the Skittles site unsuspecting of the changes that have taken place because Skittles have forced us to re-learn how to “drive” their site every time we visit a different page.

The Right Approach?

For social media to be adopted effectively, we must look at the existing brand. The stronger this is, the more sensitively we should look to engage with social media marketing (as Apple have) or risk a backlash against the brand. The smaller and more agile the company/brand, the more scope we have for experimenting with social media marketing and trying more radical approaches (as Skittles have, although I think their existing brand capital was mismatched with their strategy). In essence, a smaller brand has a lower risk of experimentation because the scope of their audience is smaller - however, even within their own brand community the risk is still high of a failed experiment.

There is also no “one size fits all” solution.

The great thing is that because it is “social” we are able to build a conversation with others and so generate brand associations which traditional marketing cannot achieve as quickly. In this sense, social media marketing is “agile marketing” (as in “agile software development“) and should be approached with a parallel methodology in my view.

Integrating Social Media & Your Brand

As part of my own social media marketing experiments I have added a Twitter feed to the Emissary Consulting website (my web business). This is titled the “CEO Pulse” and is prominently featured on the home page alongside traditional brand messages and a consistent navigation. The feed is presented consistently with the look and feel of the overall site - not in its raw form as Skittles have done. Consequently, social media is integrated into the brand at the core, and visitors can choose to explore the social side (and so gain a deeper insight into the company) or stick with the traditional messages. There are also links to latest blog posts, and a new resources page which pulls together bookmarks from Delicious that I think could be useful for people in the areas of business, marketing, design and development. Again, these feeds are integrated with the corporate website and don’t come as a surprise to the visitor (no re-learning to drive), and provide a regularly updated social snapshot of the brand and, more importantly, the thinking behind the brand to help people make decisions about the brand and how or if they are going to interact with the company.

Personally, I think this middle ground - integrated social media - is the best way forward for many SMEs in the current maturity of the Internet.

Experiment: Brand-jacking

Another experiment I tried with “agile marketing” (aka social media marketing) was to effectively brand-jack Skittles. Since there was so much talk about Skittles on Twitter, you could guarantee some exposure on the Skittles site from the Twitter feed if you mentioned the word Skittles (or #skittles). A couple of days after the initial flurry of activity had died down, I tweeted a post about the branded integration of social media in the Emissary site as an alternative approach to Skittles. This gave my company a three-hour window (approx) of visibility on the Skittles site (that was the time difference between the most recent and the oldest tweet that was displayed) and resulted in a peak of traffic to my company site and consequently a greater brand-reach. Although this was not a specifically targetted experiment aimed at converting prospects, it demonstrated the point that social media can be used to gain greater exposure of your brand.

I have also used #skittles in the title of this post because my blog posts are automatically tweeted and I am hoping the continuing debate will bring a further traffic spike and generate further discussion about social media marketing on this post

What do you think about Social Media Marketing (or “Agile Marketing” as I call it)? How did you find this post? Via Twitter, Skittles, or just surfing?

I’d love to hear from you.

However, the value of the system has declined in the past couple of years to the point that I have decided to leave.

There are two reasons for this:

1. I get consistent “add me to your contacts” requests which arrive with no message, no introduction or no reason for why that person decided to want to connect with me. This is just a numbers game and I don’t subscribe to this method of networking - I even make it clear on my Ecademy profile page but still they come in their droves (maybe it’s because I am “famous” :)). The main issue I have with the numbers game on Ecademy is that once you are connected with somebody else they are able to send mailshots to their entire contact list and some contacts tend to do this a lot and the etiquette of Ecademy does not lend itself to follow/unfollow as easily as Twitter.
2. My email address has been spammed as a direct result of the negligence of one of the founders who decided it was OK to send me and 100+ other contacts a direct email from their Google account with an attachment related to an event they invited me to via Ecademy 5 minutes previously, yet I had not confirmed attendance or requested the 2Mb PDF email. The result of exposing my email address lead to receiving another email about an hour later from a company I have had no dealings with or prior contact inviting me to watch a 10 minute video on YouTube to sell me a “work from home and make lots of money” type of business.

A social network relies on its credibility and this is achieved by how it protects its members. Sadly, Ecademy’s credibility as a social network has been completely undermined by one of its founders as they have allowed my details to enter the public domain and as a direct result has allowed my email account to be spammed. There are other privacy issues that have been discussed on other forums and blogs about Ecademy (just search Google), and while I have not been personally exposed to these issues, the fact that they exist adds weight to my reasons for cancelling my account.

However, this is not specifically a post about the actions of certain individuals within networking organisations, but their actions (and those within those networks) directly affect the value of the networks we use. And the action of lazily sending a scattered broadcast email has significantly devalued the Ecademy network (site) for me.

Twitter Value

Twitter is a social networking tool. It allows anybody with a Twitter account to listen to what you have to say. And you can talk about anything. Some people choose to use it to talk business (as part of their personal/corporate brand), while others talk about what they had for lunch or post what they are listening to. Twitter works brilliantly as the “first line” (or outer tier) of online networking - it allows for wide exposure.

In my opinion, Twitter helps “accelerate serendipity” as you can find out useful and relevant information as well as develop relationships between you and your followers. There are some very interesting and influential people on Twitter and it useful to listen what they have to say - Twitter helps you get directly to core information on almost any topic.

Ecademy Value

Notwithstanding my comments earlier, Ecademy does have a value in online networking.  I would suggest you use it as your “second line” (or middle tier). Ecademy is advertised as a “social business network”. As such, it sits in the middle ground as you can benefit from Twitter-like exposure, random friend requests, spam, junk and other rubbish. If you want to use it purely for business you will need to weigh the balance of the social stuff you will be exposed to versus the business stuff you want to engage in.

Because Ecademy offers a different tool set to Twitter, you can more effectively communicate and collaborate with contacts. There is a messaging system as well as a host of online forums covering all types of subject or territory. It is relatively easy to make global connections through Ecademy.

If you are using it as a second line network, you could connect with people from Twitter with whom you want to develop a better business relationship.

LinkedIn Value

LinkedIn has always been billed as a business network. It doesn’t have the “social” side that the previous two systems do, although there are now groups in LinkedIn. But LinkedIn feels much more tightly connected, more focused and more business oriented. I have never received a random “connect with me” request and don’t get spam, junk or endless requests for this, that or the other. It allows me to effectively manage my close connections (business and personal) - my ”third line” - and sits very well as an inner tier network.

Also, the LinkedIn interface is much less cluttered - has less calls to action - than Ecademy. As an example, on my last visit to Ecademy I counted over 50 different text links solely for actions I could perform from that page - there were two tabbed reagions above my profile, as well as an actions panel on the left. I didn’t even get to the links at the bottom of the page! This makes LinkedIn much easier to use and less overwhelming.

Using these three systems in concert allows you to funnel or group different networks more effectively. You could have 8000 Twitter followers (or follow 9000 people), 500 Ecademy connections (people you know better) and 80 LinkedIn connections (people you have a closer working/personal relationship with).

Naturally there are other systems which could be used instead of any of these (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, Ryze, Spoke, etc) but the value of these networks lies in the strength of the connections within them. 10,000 followers may be low value if you only have connections with 3 of them, but your more closely-coupled networks are where the true value lies.

So, which networks do you use, and how do you use them?

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• Social Networking Is Not Just a Numbers Game (debbieweil.com)
• The Future of the Social Web (thesocialorganization.com)
• SXSW: Privacy (and publicness) (buzzmachine.com)

• Search engine optimization (or SEO),
• Paid placement,
• Contextual advertising, and
• Paid inclusion.

In this article we will look at link building and how it fits within the overall marketing strategy for your site. 

In the above methodologies, link building sits mainly as contextual advertising but can also fit into paid placement and paid inclusion (if you have to pay for the link, obviously).

Why it’s done

In the physical world, there is an old adage: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” This means that it is more important to know the right people than know the actual information - after all, if you know the right people you can find out what you need quite easily.

In the virtual world, link building is the virtual equivalent of that.

By building a linked network of relevant websites, both to and from your own, you help search engines make an informed decision about how to rank your site. The more places you appear, the wider your network, and so the more potentially important your content is compared to other sites with a smaller network, or “reach” in SEO terms. If done well, link building increases your chances of being found by the visitors you want to find your site - ie greater finds and greater conversions as a result.

Furthermore, by appearing in other relevant places on the web, people who may be looking for your services can find you in those other places - ie you don’t have to rely on them actually visiting your site directly from a search engine - and so you further strengthen your relevancy within your reach.

The bottom line is that the link is there to direct the relevant people to your site. Period.

This means you can also target the hidden parts of the web - for example private member areas for consortiums or associations - or engage in social media exchanges. Not everything will have a direct impact on your SEO but it will meet the goal of directing the relevant people to your site.

How it’s done

The best results are achieved the old fashioned way - manually.

This requires often-lengthy periods of research looking at different sites, contacting the owners and getting links placed on the relevant page(s) in the target site. Each target site needs to be investigated for potential “spamminess” (not a real word but heard a lot in SEO circles). This means that we need to make sure we are not placing a link on a website that is poorly thought of by search engines, for example link farms.

Some websites require a fee for inclusion and can often be private, members-only directories. Although these do not have any relevancy for search engines, they are important because you have identified that your target audience is part of the membership of the target site.

Some websites will request a reciprocal link before placing your link on their site. While this two-way linking is beneficial - it helps inform search engines that you are not just a destination site, but also a good source of referrals for other sites - you will also need to think carefully about arbitrarily adding outbound links to your site because you will not want to dilute your brand. A “links” page looks out of place on many business sites, but could work well on a blog.

To reap a benefit for SEO, you will need to ensure that your actual link contains the relevant keywords you are targetting and link directly to the content that is related to these keywords. This is equivalent to creating ad copy for the Google pay-per-click ads and is an art in itself: the link needs to be meaningful and create a call to action (ie the viewer to click) yet be brief. The landing page - the content they arrive at - needs to be directly related to the link or you will lose the visitor. This may require generating additional content for your site.

Monitor your links

After you have taken time to put in place your links, monitor them. The web changes and sometimes a domain you have linked to may be sold on to a new owner and their content differ greatly from the content you originally linked to. You could find yourself directing your visitors to unsuitable content and your brand will suffer by association.

On the flip side, a site that has linked to you may become a link farm or be reduced in importance by search engines. If you are keeping an eye on how your inbound links are working you can detect changes and act accordingly.

There are three  important things to remember about link building: 

1. It will take time - it’s a slow process
2. Don’t add too many links at any one time - search engines distrust this as possible spamming
3. Monitor your links - the web changes so you don’t want any surprises

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter, part of the modern evolution of the web, provides a platform for micro-blogging. For the uninitiated, a micro-blog is effectively SMS for the web - it allows you to publish up to 140 character text messages about anything, from what you are eating for lunch through to useful references or work-related information.

But it’s more than just a push platform - it’s a collaboration and community tool. People can respond to your posts (called “Tweets”) directly - it’s what makes it different and more than just an RSS feed. You can also read and/or post from both mobile phones, the web and popular IM clients such as Windows Live Messenger and Digsby. There are also a host of other applications that allow interaction with Twitter.

So, where does Twitter sit in your communication strategy?

Blogs are quite easy to place - a business blog contains business-related information, such as this one. Articles are usually longer and more informative and range from technical to strategic. The blog helps visitors understand you/your company better taken as a whole (they can see the focus from the types of posts).

Websites are easy too - they are about your company. They tell people who you are, what you do and why they should buy from you. They also sell things like electronics, books, toys, furniture, jewellery and all manner of things.

Email marketing is also clear - it’s about promotion, the latest news, the newest offer, or a press release. There are other uses, but it’s usually a one-to-many output which can either inform, build the brand, or call the reader to action.

So what is Twitter?

It’s similar to your subconscious - a list of things you might like to blog, but are either too short or not quite on-brand (for business blogs), or conversely too business-like (e.g. blatant self-promotion) for personal blogs. Twitter sits between these worlds and is an acceptable platform to post personal as well as business Tweets. As a marketing tool, you need to determine what is an acceptable work/life balance to create, but the idea about Twitter is to create a constant stream of consciousness - it’s “all about you, baby”. And it’s not conversation either - keep that for IM clients or phone calls.

One important thing to remember is that people reading your Tweets want to know you, so too much self-promotion will have them switching off and not following you. Remember too that you need to occasionally respond to Tweets from people you are following - it’s a community thing too - you need to be involved with your network of followers and the people you are following. It’s the virtual equivalent of referrals. Remember too that it’s a fluid environment, so followers will come and go so don’t panic about losing people along the way. You will evolve your strategy over time and settle on a format that works for you - there’s no magic bullet.

It’s also a great tool to ask people who are following you for input - for example “anybody going to event x?”, “does anybody know about AdWords?”, “can anybody recommend an electrician?”, “what’s a good Lebanese restaurant in London?” These types of posts encourage community and communication, as well as providing insights about you/your brand which would not be obvious from your website, blog or email campaigns - or even be appropriate for them. In this sense, it is a perfect online mirror for offline business networks and allows you the ability to instantly connect to your network without the need for bespoke online tools or logging in to a website before you can check your updates. With Twitter it’s always on, and integrations through your IM client (e.g. Windows Live, Digsby, etc) provide you immediate feedback as it happens.

In essence - to answer the question “what is Twitter” - it is an online, interactive networking tool that allows you to collaborate with co-workers, friends (and complete strangers) through which you can enhance your personal identity/brand.

One guide I use is “don’t witter on Twitter or you’ll end up being a twit.”

Read more:
Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
Using Twitter Properly (Part 3)
Twitter gets some notice in the enterprise

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Image by LollyKnit via Flickr

Towards the end of May, the AVG Security Suite started spewing fake hits to websites across the web which appear as web stats in your web analytics reports. Given there are approximately 20 million users of the new AVG suite, this amounts to a very large amount of fake traffic.

In February, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its LinkScanner tool, then bundled the tool in the latest AVG release. What the LinkScanner does - in an effort to protect the user from being hacked, spammed or spoofed - is to pretend that it is a human and “clicks” on every link found in search engine results. So when you visit Google and search for something, every single result found is visited by LinkScanner to determine if the website linked is legitimate or a link to malware. The end result is what appears to be real traffic on the website.

For small sites, this is not going to make much difference, although it may appear you have more visitors than usual. For larger sites with high traffic volumes, this will mean a large spike in traffic. But, it will also potentially mean larger bills because website owners have to pay for bandwidth (small sites are below the minimum threshold so this doesn’t become an issue).

Adam Beale, who runs a UK-based internet consultancy, says that across his small stable of clients, traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites. And this is more than just an inconvenience. After all, sites live and die by their traffic numbers. And net resources aren’t free.

“Although [the AVG LinkScanner] might be good for the security of users, it’s a real pain for website owners and webmasters. It’s causing people to think their traffic is increasing, costing those who pay for bandwidth, and wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files.”

One of his clients, Beale says, normally pulls in 140GB of bandwidth a month, and for June, he predicts a 5 per cent jump.

At the moment, there is a way of filtering AVG traffic from log files. But it’s unclear whether this method would filter out legitimate traffic as well. After all, the traffic appears to come from numerous legitimate IP addresses of general web users. And AVG suggests that - in the name of high security - they may make changes that prevent such filtering. After all, if you can filter it, so can the malware producers they are trying to block.

“A situation like this generates false traffic, bogus data, and this leads to wrong budget decisions and marketing activities,” says Barry Parshall, director of product management at WebTrends, a popular web analytics firm. “I completely get the value proposition [of LinkScanner], but it would be responsible of them to identify themselves, with agent code or whatever it might be, so legitimate businesses can serve their customers properly.”

AVG have promised a fix to alleviate this condition, but until then pay close attention to the number of very short duration visits you receive on your website (assuming you have good analytics software that shows you this kind of statistic). If you are using basic log file analysis software that does not show the duration of visits or allow you to drill down into the details, it may be time to upgrade or consider more thorough tools such as Google Analytics, Yahoo!, comScore, or Nielsen NetRatings.

UPDATE: 31st July - AVG has now been updated to prevent the spurious web stats issues from the LinkScanner tool. More here.

Marketing - it (usually) starts once the site is launched (notwithstanding any pre-launch campaigns of course).

However, the marketing plan is a key tool in understanding the needs of the website before design and development begin - the plan helps identify the demographics of your target audience as well as possibly indicating traffic volumes or targets. This information feeds into the user interface, graphic design, site engine, hosting and infrastructure components so that the right systems are designed and built to meet your needs and your audience’s needs.

I am not going to get into a discussion of which marketing channels you should use because there is no hard and fast rule - except to say that you should look at all the channels and decide which will be best for your site, from online communities, through video blogs, podcasts, search engine optimisation, traditional advertising or even targeted mailshots and postcards.

We’re not quite finished! The website is up and running and you are actively marketing it, but you still need to maintain it to keep it fresh and relevant for your audience. We’ll look at that in the next article.

The truth of the matter is that links are good - they are the virtual world’s answer to “it’s not what you know (your content) but who you know (how you are linked).” In reality - for search engines at least - it’s both that matter; ie you need good content and links.

However, links are not without their downsides.

Firstly, it takes time to establish good links - you need to forage the web and often apply to be linked from certain sites that are relevant to you. You may also need to pay for some links.

Secondly, links can be transient - places you are linked from today may not be there tomorrow and so your nett inbound links can decrease unless you monitor them. The same is true of out-bound links from your site. The nature of sites where your links are can also change, in turn changing the way search engines view the relevance and importance of the link; positive links can turn into negative ones if the nature of the linking site changes significantly (fortunately this is very rare, but it can happen).

We have a client who had linked to a small, independent search engine from their website. The link had been there for a couple of years. Without any warning, the owner of search engine website sold the domain to a spam portal promoting everything from gambling to porn. Overnight, a respectable referral from our client turned into a case of bad PR. Needless to say the link was removed, but it is important to check your links - in and out - regularly.

Thirdly, the actual copy that you use to link to your site has an effect on the value of the link itself - get it right and search engines will love you; get it wrong and it could be seen as an attempt to spam the search engines resulting in your site dropping in the search engine results.

So, how many links should you look for? And should you do it yourself?

The first question has a relative answer. It’s relative to how much you want to increase your targeted traffic and also relative to what other competitors are doing in your market. Remember that links include traffic from members-only directories - these links can provide much better targeted traffic for your product or service, while public links can increase your overall search engine position.

There are tools such as Market Leap’s link popularity check which provide a comparative review of your site alongside your competitors and such tools are an excellent start-point for your link building campaign.

The second question is simply one of time and learning. When you embark on your own campaign there will be a learning curve - lots of reading and some trial and error. You need to assess each potential link partner and, once linked, ensure they keep your link alive. You also need to link out from your site appropriately so search engines see you as a good referrer - a “links” page is treated with less relevance than links embedded within key content on your site for example.

If you haven’t got the time and don’t want to climb the learning curve, find a good agency to do the work for you. They should always present any candidate link partners to you - after all it’s your site. They should also present a report of their initial investigation or rationale behind the number and types of links they recommend.