Use of social media in the industrial b2b sector is a touchy subject. Companies either love it or hate it. The below post is a comment I left in response to a LinkedIn discussion within the Manufacturers of Upstate NY group.

Social Media and Industrial Companies

Great Discussion!

Mike’s comment is similar to my own experience. I too have found it difficult to persuade industrial clients to further engage, or engage at all, in social media. Most just do not see the value.

However, like Ken, I have seen some incredible successes using Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn, YouTube and even the B2C centric Facebook.

As has happened time and time again over the past two decades, I predict that industrial companies will adopt what other verticals have already embraced – social media.

When I started selling online marketing solutions to industrial clients back in 2000, we had trouble convincing companies that a good website would generate leads. When Site-Seeker started promoting search engine marketing in 2003, clients would retort “industrial buyers don’t use search engines”.

Today this sounds ridiculous. Yet try to convince any industrial company that they should take down their website or remove webpages ranking in Google and you’d be lucky to escape with your life.

Well guess what. The early adopters, the companies that have improved their website and engaged in search engine marketing, now have a huge head start and competitive advantage over their competition.

So here we are, the next great technological advancement on Al Gore’s Internet highway is right in front of us. Is it possible that this new concept, social media (already a decade old), is so different from websites or search engine marketing that it will fad away? Could it be that the generation of 20 somethings that spent their tween and teen years on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube will abandon their old habits and ignore social media as they progress through their working careers? And what about the droves of 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds that are have recently found Facebook? Will the skills they develop and benefits they realize from participation in the social media craze be only applied to their personal lives?

Maybe we should ignore all this social media stuff and stick with raditional media venues like the search engines. Sounds funny right! Oh wait, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine!

Anyone want to place a friendly wager that in five years, social media in the industrial sector will be as common as websites and search engine marketing?

Tinurl.com here and biy.ly there, everywhere you look more people using URL Shorteners. But why?

URL shorteners are used for two primary purposes (and one secondary reason below).

1. To reduce the number of characters in a URL. For example, my recent post titled PageRank Sculpting is not Unethical has an actual URL of http://www.site-seeker.com/briansblog/?p=337. Using bit.ly I was able to redirect this URL to http://bit.ly/6vuLoR, a character reduction of 20 (44 to 24). Pretty cool and very important in the world of Twitter where each Tweet is allotted only 140 characters.
2. Access to tracking data. Bit.ly, my URL shortener of choice, allows tracking of several key metrics including clicks over time, referring site, and location (country). Site-Seeker’s Kathy Hokunson published a popular post, My Social Media ROI – The Top 10 List on 7 December, 2009. Using bit.ly’s tracking service you can see that Kathy’s article has generate 579 bit.ly clicks, 438 of which came through the bit.ly URL I created.

   

   Bit.ly allows you to see the total clicks on all bit.ly URLs pointing to a specific page and, a subset, the clicks that were originated via your bit.ly URL. This is very helpful when monitoring the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

   With bit.ly, I can also see where visitors came from by country.

   

   Bit.ly provides user location data. Useful information if you are targeting a specific country.

An important secondary reason to use a URL shortener is to improve the visual appeal of a URL. For example, if I wanted to share a Google search engine results page for the search “Internet marketing Syracuse NY” (Sorry couldn’t help but sculpt a little link love off this page – refer to my post PageRank Sculpting is Not Unethical – damn, I did it again ), the following Google URL would be generated: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=internet+marketing+syracuse+ny&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS312US313&ie=UTF-8.

I don’t know about you, but this 123 character URL is plain old scary. Using bit.ly, I shortened this URL to http://bit.ly/89BGsK which contains 20 characters. Much better – less intimidating, and easier to Tweet, insert into blog posts and include in an email.

So how does URL shortening effect SEO and PageRank?

Summary of URL shorteners and SEO - for your scanning pleasure.

• Some URL shorteners, like bit.ly, 301 redirect the shortened URL to the original, longer, URL.
• In these cases PageRank is passed.
• Impact on SEO = none.

If you’re a glutton for SEO technobabble, read on…

I spent part of this past Saturday brainstorming a b2b blogging strategy with my friend Luke. Luke has implemented a pretty cool article marketing process as a way to develop links to his site and ultimately achieve ranking for targeted keywords. He is using a shortened URL to link from his articles, placed on article directory sites, to his blog posts. Our discussion quickly turned to the impact of URL shorteners on SEO and specifically, the passing of PageRank through shortened URLs.

Why URL Shorteners DON’T hurt SEO and DO pass PageRank. The two most popular URL shorteners, tinyurl.com and bit.ly, 301 redirect the shortened URLs to the original longer URL. A 301 redirect is a web severer code telling the search engines that the shortened URL has been permanently moved to the longer URL. Accordingly, the link credit established each time your shortened URL is tweeted (or otherwise linked to) is passed back to the original longer URL.

Matt Cutts weights in on the ability of URL shorteners to pass PageRank in this video. The bottom line is that if your selected service 301 redirects to the original URL, then PageRank will be passed.

Link rot and URL shorteners – potential SEO danger. Suppose sometime in the future, your URL shortener ceases to exists or reverts all 301 redirects to 302 (temporary) redirects? Then what? If this happens, your screwed! Plain and simple.

What are the chances of this happening? It’s not that far fetched actually. Tr.im announced last August that they would be discontinuing service. Zi.ma similarly stopped offering it’s service. Fortunately in the latter case, Kl.am stepped in and has kept those links working (see reference to Danny Sullivan’s article below).

My recommendation is to stick with one of the bigboys to lessen the chances of losing all of your hard earned link juice.

Other URL shortener References.

• Wilipedia on URL shortening.
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? by Danny Sullivan.
• Why use a URL shortener – by yours truly – will be published on Friday 29 January, 2010.

I recently had a conversation about PageRank sculpting with a SEO pro for which I have a lot of respect. I was reminded that Google does not view PageRank sculpting as unethical. As proof, see Matt Cutts’ video on the subject.

In this video, Matt makes the following points:

1. PageRank sculpting is not unethical!
2. You are allowed to control how PageRank flows within your site.
3. PageRank sculpting should not be your highest SEO priority. Consider building links to your site and developing more high quality content. High quality content will attract more links, which will attract more PageRank.
4. Nofollow links (rel=nofollow) are not the most effective way to sculpt PageRank. If you follow Matt’s blog, you’ll remember his 15 June, 2009 post titled PageRank Sculpting in which Matt clarifies how PageRank scultping is (or is not) impacted by the use nofollow attribute.
5. A better way to control the flow of PageRank within your site is to limit the number of outbound (internal or external) links form a page.

Here’s what you should takeaway.

Every website should be built and managed with the anticipation that it will someday possess significant PageRank. Even a newer website, or a website with low PageRank, may potentially someday possess a good amount. Creating your website today without taking this into consideration is foolish. Doing so means that all your efforts to create great content and attract internal links will return less than optimal results.

So what should you do?

When creating or managing your website, be careful to understand how linking between pages can impact ranking and traffic to your site. Develop a site-wide linking plan and stick to it.

Let me know if you need help.

brian

Q: What happens when you combine a band, a restaurant, and lunch in Utica, NY?

A: Relaxation, good food, good friends, a bit of business, and a great start to your afternoon.

Did you ever have one of those crazy weeks when it seems like you’ll never catch up no matter how long you work? Well that’s how I felt until about 11:59a on Friday of this week. What happened to change my outlook? I had the good fortune of being invited, and the smarts (perhaps luck) to attend, a lunch-time show by gr6 at the Tramontane Cafe (the “Tram”) Cafe in Utica, NY.

gr6, a 3 piece acoustic band, plays all of the best songs from my younger days. Rick Short (website, blog, Twitter) (guitar, vocals), Rich Nasbe (guitar, vocals), and Conrad (mandolin, vocals) exude a relaxing and inviting atmosphere while playing some really great music. The best part is that you can still carry on a conversation.

The Tramontane, is a small cafe in Utica, NY (1105 Lincoln Ave Utica, New York) that offers a totally unique experience. Most of the furniture, no two pieces alike, looks like it came straight out of some 1970’s movie.  If you need a shot of adrenaline to get through your afternoon, then this is not the spot for you. On the other hand, if your want a relaxing break with no pressure, good people, and great food, then the Tram is a great choice.

Next time you Google “bands Utica, NY”, “restaurants Utica, NY”, or “cafes Utica, NY” look for a listing for gr6 or the Tram.

Corporate blogging Tips (7-10).

This is the third and final part in a three part series on my top 10 corporate blogging tips.

• Business Blogging Tip 1-3 (Part 1)
• Blogging for Business Tips 4-6 (Part 2)

Corporate Blogging Tip 7 (Fully Utilize the Advanced Features of Your Blogging Platform)

There are a lot of blogging platforms and each had its pros and cons. I’m a Wordpress.org fan, but the other blogging platforms are also very good. The point is to select a platform and learn it. In Wordpress.org, the version of Wordpress that you download and host yourself, there are several useful plugins including pretty permalinks and the all in one SEO pack. There are many more, but as I mentioned in Corporate Blogging Tip 5, I need to stay on message.

Pretty premalinks create a static URL for each post and place the words in your post title in the URL. This is great for SEO. Depending on when you read this post you may notice that we are not using pretty premalinks. This is a limitation of our current host and one that we are in the process of resolving.

The all in on SEO pack allows you to edit the title (the title within the <head> of your document, not the blog post title), meta description, and meta keyword tags. Only the title currently impacts ranking. However, the description often appears on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and can influence searchers to click on your listing. Adding meta keywords is just a good practice.

Corporate Blogging Tip 8 (Publish Frequently)

You should post at least once a week. This is easier said than done. Your efforts will be rewarded if you post regularly.

Corporate Blogging Tip 9 (Distribute/Re-purpose Blog Content)

One of the benefits corporations get from blogging is that they can leverage their investment in the creation of blog posts over and over again. Corporate blog posts can be the subject of white papers, presentations (as this post will be), seminars, and webinars (which this post is).

Social media is an important aspect of corporate blogging. Twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, YouTube, podcasts and social bookmarking are great ways to distribute posts and develop a following.

• Twitter – Tweet blog titles and include a link back your post. I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs.
• LinkedIn
  • Use the LinkedIn Wordpress application (or similar application if you are not using Wordpress)  to integrate snippets from your blog posts into your profile.
  • Join LinkedIn groups that are interesting to your customers. When on the main page of a group, you can start a discussion by clicking on the “start a discussion” link and adding the title, an excerpt, and a link to your post (again use a shortener like bit.ly). If you post compelling titles and good content, you will earn the right to engage with group members.
• Facebook – Similar to LinkedIn.
• YouTube/Podcasts – Film/Record someone “presenting” your post and publish your this content to YouTube/iTunes and other video and podcast sites.
• Social Bookmarking – Encourage readers to bookmark your posts by integrating one of the many bookmarking icons/tools in your blog.

Corporate Blogging Tip 10 (Create Buzz by Posting Comments on Other blogs)

Go to Google Blog search and search for your selected keywords. In the case of this post, I would search for corporate blogging and corporate blogging tips. Post a minimum of three comments per post. For really important (competitive keywords) posts add as many as 20 comments to popular blogs. Don’t spam other bloggers. Take the time to leave valuable comments. You don’t have to agree with the other blogger, just be genuine.

Use Google Blog Search to find related blogs. Post meaningful comments and link back to your post. If you provide value, other bloggers will start to comment on your posts.

This concludes part three. Click on one of the below links to view Business Blogging Tips – Part 1, or the Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2.

• Business Blogging Tips 1-3
• Blogging for Business Tips 4-6

Blogging for Business Tips (4-6)

This post is part two of a three part series on my top 10 blogging for business tips.

• Business Blogging Tips 1-3
• Corporate Blogging Tips 7-10

Blogging for Business Tip 4 (Selecting Keywords)

Develop blog posts with the intent of driving traffic to your website. The best way to do that is to get your post to rank on the first page of Google, Yahoo!, or bing for a specific keyword phrase. To find keywords with high search frequency (popular keywords), use Google’s external keyword tool. Don’t forget to change the “Match Type” to “Exact”.

Business Blogging Tip 1 - Use a keyword research tool to select popular and non-competitive keywords.

Identify popular but non-competitive keywords. Google’s external keyword tool contains a bar graph in the column titled “Advertiser Competition”. The further the green bar extends to the right, the more competitive the keyword and the less likely your post will rank in Google. While this indicator applies to advertiser (pay per click) competitiveness, it is a good clue as to natural or organic search competitiveness.

As another indicator of keyword competitiveness, conduct a Google search, placing your keyword in quotes. The lower the number of search results the less competitive the keyword and the better the chance your blog post will rank for your selected term. Referring to the below image, I elected to write the Business Blogging Tips Part 1 post about “Business Blogging” for three reasons.

1. It exactly relates exactly to my subject.
2. It has 50% greater local search volume (2,400 for business blogging, vs. 1,600 for corporate blogging).
3. With only 467,000 pages in Google’s index for this term, I believe that I have a decent chance of ranking for this term.

Blogging for business success revolves around writing great posts and getting your posts to rank in the search engines. Selecting keywords is critical. If you select keywords that are too competitive, you won't rank. If you choose keywords that are never searched, you might rank on the first page, but no one will ever see your post. You should understand how powerful your site is and target keywords appropriately. Start with easy/non-competitive keywords and gradually adjust your targets based on your successes and failures.

This begs the question “How competitive can my keywords be, without jeopardizing the likelihood that my  blog post will rank?”  This is the subject of an entirely different post and has to do with many factors. If you’d like to discuss this feel free to give me a call (315)732-9281 x11.

Finally, you may ask why I added the word “tips” to my selected keyword phrase. I’m hoping that even if my part one post does not rank for business blogging, it will have a chance to rank for business blogging tips.

Blogging for Business Tip 5 (Blog Post Title)

Writing a compelling post title is one of the most important steps in business blogging. A compelling blog post title encourages readers to spend the next 3-10 minutes of their life reading your post. Make sure to incorporate your keywords into your post title. This will support your search engine optimization effort.

Lists make great titles. The title of the part 1 post is “Business Blogging Tips – All Time Top 10“. I could have titled this post “Top 10 Business Blogging Tips”, but I wanted the words “business blogging tips” to be the first words readers see.

Blogging for Business Tip 6 (Blog Content)

Business blog posts are best if they are short. In general you want readers to be able to completely read your post in five minutes or less. This post ended up being too long so I broke it up into 3 parts.

Add images and other media (YouTube videos, PowerPoint presentations, …) to clarify your point and make your post visually appealing.

flickr is a great source of images. Be use to use the advanced search feature and select creative commons-licensed content available for commercial use.

Select images using flickr's advanced search creative commons option.

Visually break up longer blog posts with larger bold text headers to make them easier for readers to scan. Using heading 1, heading 2 and heading 3 formatted text options will help your search engine ranking and make it easier for your readers.

Stay on theme. If you find yourself drifting off subject, create the additional content and place it in a separate post. Then link to that post to make your slightly off-subject point.

For search engine optimization purposes you want your selected keywords to appear in your blog post frequently, but not to the point that your post sounds spammy.

That’s it for part two. Click below for Business Blogging Tips – Part 1 or Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3.

• Business Blogging Tips 1-3
• Corporate Blogging Tips 7-10.

Business blogging tips.

After four months of studying business blogging and testing various blogging tips, I’m ready to share my top 10 business blogging tips. These 10 little gems, will be broken up into three separate posts.

What did I do over my summer vacation? Why study business blogging of course! I was asked to speak on a panel about business blogging at the Product Development and Management Association’s 33rd Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA. See my related post – PDMA 2009 – Got Blog – The Perfect Storm. So with the primary goal of not embarrassing myself and the secondary goal delivering value to the audience (just being honest – survival instinct kicked in), I set out to learn all there is to know about business blogging. While it would be arrogant to think that I actually did learn everything, I have managed to put together these top 10 actionable business bogging tips. Hope you find them useful.

Top 10 Business Blogging Tips

Business Blogging Tip 1 (Finding Subjects to Blog About)

The first step in successful business blogging is to find the conversation online. You need to know where and what is being said about the subjects you and your customers care about. Google alerts and Google reader are great ways to start.

Google alerts notifies you every one of the terms you listed appears in Google’s index. You can add your company name, the names of employees, product names, or even the names of your children. My college age daughters love the last one.

Create a Google alerts accounts and enter important words or phrases. Use quotes to reduce the amount of unrelated email you receive. Also, adjust the "how often" column to place greater emphasis on more important phrases.

Google reader allows you to subscribe to different sites related to interesting subjects.

Create a Google reader account, click "add a subscription" and search for the phrases that interests you. Next, simply click the "subscribe" button that appears under the listing. The next time you view your Google reader account it will be populated with all of the updates for the sites you selected.

Business Blogging Tip 2 (Stay Organized)

Let’s face it we all have too much to do already. Business blogging is one of those extra duties that can easily be pushed to the back burner. Did you ever notice that what separates good from great companies has less to do with having a great idea and more to do with doing the right thing day in and day out? Well blogging is one of those day to day tasks, that if done regularly, will really pay off.

Below, I described my approach to managing this extra duty, this pain in the neck task, this beast we call business blogging. My approach isn’t perfect, but it works for me and maybe it will work for you. If you have suggestions, I would appreciate a comment.

The first step is to develop a method to collect and organize blog post ideas. I suggest that you use Instapaper. Instapaper offers a Firefox extension that places a “read later” button in your Firefox tool bar. When browsing Google reader or any web page, simply click “read later” and the page you are on will be saved to your Instapaper account. Within Instapaper, you can organize web pages into folders. I have folders for SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), social media, and blogging. When I come across an interesting article, I simply save it to Instapaper. Later, when I have time, I read the article and decide if it deserves further attention.

Here’ my favorite part. There’s a iPhone app that syncs with Instapaper. This give me the flexibility to review the pages I’ve selected at my convenience. How cool! The iPhone app isn’t free ($5) but it was well worth the few dollars.

Create an Instapaper account. Next, download the Instapaper Firefox extension and install the "read later" button. If you have an iPhone, I suggest you buy the mobile app to sync and access your stored articles on your phone.

Business Blogging Tip 3 (Use your Todo List to Collect Post Ideas)

Many times, I’ll be sitting at my desk reading an online article or just daydreaming when suddenly, POW!, I come up with the mother of all blog post ideas. Of course this only happens when I don’t have the time to whip out a post. To avoid losing track of the Idea, I use my todo list to capture thoughts and document links to reference material. Then later, when I have about an hour of quite time, I’ll review list of post ideas and start writing. There are a lot of great todo list choices, but I like Things. Things is a Mac application from Cultured Code. It won the Macworld Best of Show 2009 award. The desktop app costs $50, and the iPhone app isn’t cheap either at $10. For me it was worth the money.

Document post ideas in your todo list. I use Things which allows me to record ideas and store notes including links and my thoughts about a subject. Then later, when I have time to write, I scan my list of post ideas, select one and start typing.

I hoped you enjoyed Business Blogging Tips part 1. Click a link below for Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2, and Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3.

• Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2
• Corporate Blogging Tips – Part 3

Twitter popularity – passing fade or here to stay? eMarketer published a story today titled “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up… Tweeting no more?“.

Having spent the last week at Pubcon listening to the deafening drumbeat about Twitter’s growing popularity, I have to say that this title made me wonder if the late night Pubcon parties had negatively impacted my cognitive abilities and caused me to mis-remember all that was presented at Pubcon. But alas the title is misleading, but then again I guess that was the point.

Here’s what the article points out.

1. More and more people are using third party applications to post tweets. The result is that people do not visit Twitter as often as they once did. No duh! There is no reason to visit Twitter.com if you can tweet for a third party app. The decrease in traffic to Twitter in depicted in this table.
   

   Traffic to www.twitter.com is down.

2. This does not mean that Twitter popularity is decreasing. In fact just the opposite is true, Twittter is more popular than ever. With 18 million users in 2009, estimates predict Twitter users will reach 26 million next year.
   

   Twitter popularity continues to rise.

   So there you go. This just proves that it is possible to learn at Pubcon on just a few hours sleep per night.

Pubcon Las Vegas 2009 Highlights – Top 5 Pubcon Highlights.

Where should I start? I’m not sure what I enjoyed more, the people and networking (aka parties) or the seminars. If you are not aware “PubCon is four days of leading edge education and networking in over 90 sessions featuring 200 expert speakers in Social Media, Affiliate Programs, Search, and SEO/SEM. In its 8th year, PubCon was founded out of the rich and diverse base of WebmasterWorld forums.”

Great networking party at the MGM Grand

In addition to the four day Tuesday through Friday conference, I attended the first ever Monday Pubcon training program. I sat in on the SEO (Organic Search Optimization) & Marketing Track. Anyone interested in catching up on the lastest in SEO should consider this extra day. Well worth the $$

Top 5 Pubcon Highlights

1. Page load speed will become an important Google ranking factor in 2010. Check out this interview between Mike McDonald of WebProNews and Google’s Matt Cutts. Matt mentions a Google resource to determine how fast your site is loading.  Matt also talked about several additional tools including Page Speed (a Firefox extension) and WebPageTest.
2. YouTube is the second most popular search engine; BUT only about 41% of search marketers include YouTube as part of their Internet marketing plans. This is a huge opportunity for anyone trying to increase traffic and online opportunity.
3. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) has big plans for bing. He hopes that the new search engine will capture 51% of all search market share.  Well, there’s only one way to go… up.
4. Social media is HUGE, but still only accounts for a less than one percentage of all referrals.
5. If you are ever in the need for a late night pizza, you can call Zappos. Actually this is part of a story keynote speaker and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh used to explained how he and his team built Zappos into the giant that it is today through the development of a strong culture of customer service.

Source = Chitika Research. Referrals -- Search still dominates Social Media

As a final note I’d like to thank my Spanish and Irish friends for another great time in Vegas.