Category Archives: Facebook

November 3, 2010

Seven lame, business-killing excuses for not having a social media presence.

By Giselle Bisson

1. You’re too busy.

I don’t think social media is optional anymore — a professional presence in social media is now a marketing necessity, like a business card or a website. You can’t afford not to have a social media presence. You’ll look like a Luddite, like you’re out of step, like you’re stuck in the Eighties — when people actually got their news from a newspaper, bought things from ads and were influenced by television.

For most businesses and professions, social media is important. (It’s not as useful for big brands and large corporations, unless the communication is coming from a charismatic CEO or spokesperson.) Make an investment in social media, plan your strategy first, do it right, and you’ll be paid back ten-fold.

Updating your profile and sending out Twitter updates can become part of your regular routine — like brushing your teeth, answering email and checking your voice mail.

Using free tools, you can interlink all of your social profiles — so that your Twitter automatically updates Facebook, your blog and LinkedIn. You can update everything simultaneously from your mobile phone in a few minutes a day.

2. You don’t “get” this social media thing.

When you tell stories in public, not only do they have to be true (fact checked, verified, libel-free and legal), accurate, spell-checked and well written, but your story needs to be interesting, engaging and continually evolving. If you’re not naturally good at that, or you don’t have time, you’ll want to hire professional help.

Ultimately, you’ll need to be engaged on a daily basis. Celebrities, consultants, musicians, workshop leaders, public speakers and CEOs who “get” social media make it a priority and are personally involved. You can also outsource social updating to a pro. But make sure they take time to truly know and understands your business, know how to tell an engaging story, have a “voice” and “get” the culture, ethics and rules of the community you’re trying to reach.

3. You can’t afford it.

Everything you need is free. If you hire a consultant, you can get a lot of value from a few hours of his/her time setting your site up and coaching you on the unwritten secrets, tips and tricks of really using Social Media brilliantly.

4. You don’t need it.

Just like you “didn’t need” a website back in 2000. Everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, killed brick and mortar businesses, got all the cool urls and are now worth millions. Are you going to miss out on this land grab too?

500 million people worldwide are utilizing Facebook to create their personal brand. Many events are solely promoted on Facebook. You are really late to the program and totally out of the loop and out of touch if you have a stagnant, unupdated profile or none at all.  These days a lot of people think you don’t exist anymore if you’re not in the social sphere because they aren’t even using email anymore and use Facebook or LinkedIn as their main way of communicating with colleagues, or Twitter as their main way to announce breaking news.

5. You’re doing fine with Google adwords.

Oh yeah? Why are you buying search results that will disappear as soon as you stop paying — when you could be using social sites and a blog to build a search ranking that will last forever. Also, you’re totally missing out on a highly targeted market if you’re not also advertising on Facebook.

6. You already hired an SEO guy.

In my opinion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is dead in 2010. It was important in the age of static HTML websites in the 90s.

Why? Because search engines can only search text! The most important thing you can do is generate tons of text and mentions of your URL that will drive people back to your website.  More about this tomorrow.

7. It’s not necessary.

If you are not on social media, your business reputation is at risk! Ignore social media at your peril–because people are probably talking about you, your competitors and your brand. They’re building relationships without you. They’re inviting people to cool events that you’re not learning about.  If you’re not on social media by now, it’s as if you don’t exist.

Bad PR used to be quickly forgotten when the newspaper was tossed in the trash. Now it lasts forever in Cyberspace. Bad customer reviews can quickly destroy a new product launch, a new event or a beta program.  Bad word of mouth on social networks will severely damage your personal reputation.

Negative reviews on Yelp can kill a restaurant in a few days. Don’t worry, you can now pay Yelp a monthly fee (aka bribe) to remove bad reviews. Better off to not get them in the first place.

You need to be prepared to brand yourself and position yourself wisely. And you need to pay attention to what your peers, competitors and partners are saying in the social realm.

If your business is large, you’ll also need to track the coverage and monitor feedback so you can respond to customers immediately. It’s all quickly becoming as complex as a traditional, mainstream media PR program.

Whatever you call it — Social Media, Emerging Media, New Media — it’s all just a conversation.

But it’s a conversation you can’t avoid anymore.  Ignore it at your peril or it will happen without you.  It’s time to lead the conversation.

83 comments | posted in blog, damage control, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, PR Newswire, press release, public relations, renegade marketing, search engine optimization, seo, shameless self promotion, social media, Twitter, viral, viral video, website, Wordpress

October 20, 2010

Facebook Lessons from “South Park” — Never play Farmville!

By Giselle Bisson

Everything you need to know about Facebook is in this darkly funny episode of “South Park.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Kyle “friends” the wrong person on Facebook.  Now all of his friends are unfriending him. His situation is desperate.

His father and even grandma start hassling him for not friending them.  Frustrated and tired of wasting his life online, he attempts to delete his Facebook profile, but gets sucked into the the inner Tron-like vortex of Facebook, where he’s forced to into exile in Farmville.

I mention this South Park episode, because it’s a biting satire about the ways that Facebook and life begin to become inexorably intertwined.

When you start a profile on Facebook, you enter into a new level of relationship with your “real world” friends and business connections.  They begin to expect you to actually read and respond to them. It’s a time commitment that can start to feel like you’ve been sucked into the Matrix and no longer have time for the Real World.

Adding the wrong friends can diminish your status–or cause your higher profile friends to “unfriend” you. Forget to check “in a relationship,” and it will inevitably lead to offline drama with your girlfriend.

And if you neglect to “friend” someone, they’re sooooo offended.  Especially people you don’t want to show your profile to, like Grandma.

“Friends shouldn’t be some sort of commodity for status,” says Stan, wisely, but it’s too late. He’s trapped in the Matrix of Facebook, where everyone (even Grandma) expects him to respond to their pokes — and Facebook won’t let him delete his profile.

2 comments | posted in Facebook, privacy, social media, Uncategorized

September 28, 2010

Should Facebook add more “in a relationship” options? Or should we just be discreet?

By Giselle Bisson

Is it tacky to announce your relationship status on a Social Network?

Move over Brad and Angie! Now with Facebook, you too can be as embarrassingly public with your infidelities as a Hollywood celebrity!

Unless it’s really going to benefit your business or career — announcing your new relationship status is probably not a good idea in a public forum. And it’s a really, really bad idea if you care about your career reputation.

Personally, I’d like to see people use more tact, thoughtfulness and discretion before they click any “In a Relationship” button out here in Facebook-land.”

Many of my solidly married friends don’t even announce their relationship status on Facebook.

But seems that people who just hooked up two weeks ago at a party are quick to brag about how in love they are and click that: “In a Relationship” button.

And the brutally honest and much more realistic: “It’s complicated.”

I even know a woman who clicked “In a Relationship” when her “boyfriend” was a personal ad pen pal who lived in another state and they hadn’t even met yet.

Social Currency and trust is what it’s all about in the new era of Social Networks. Our network is our net worth. Consider how your actions will be regarded in terms of your overall trustworthiness and “flake factor” before you post anything in a social forum. Relationships come and go, but reputations linger in Cyberspace forever.

I see grown, middle aged adults on Facebook like dumping their ex-spouse for someone they hooked up with a few weeks ago and then announcing and bragging about their new love affair publicly on Facebook.

It can inspire some incredible cruelty and tastelessness. Or what many call: “Facebook Drama.”

Perhaps I am being a bit old fashioned and “Miss Manners” here by suggesting that we wait six months at minimum, until relationships are solid — just as one might want to wait 3 months before announcing they’re pregnant, or waiting until they have an offer letter in hand before announcing a new job.

Today, someone posted this on Facebook:

“I am seeing someone, but that is not an option. Here there’s ‘its complicated’ — but that it is not. And there is ‘in a relationship’ but we are not there yet. We are trying to go slow, but I want a way to know Iam not available but am very interested in someone. Might that change?”

Do you think Facebook should add a new relationship status?

Facebook is considering some new “In a relationship” options. What do you think? Here are some options that readers of “All Facebook” have suggested:

- need a rebound

- in a rebound relationship

- hate my ex and need a rebound

- off the market

- common law marriage

- seeing someone

- confused

- stalkers not wanted

- separated, not looking

- serial dater

- cruising

- just looking

And…

- “I gave up.”

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in damage control, Facebook, privacy, public relations, shameless self promotion, social media

September 28, 2010

Holacracy and Facebook — are we creating a global brain?

By Giselle Bisson

A map of the Internet

For three weeks this summer, I was totally off the grid and more or less out of touch while immersed in a permaculture workshop near Mt. Shasta. Permaculture, which literally means “permanent agriculture”, is a systems design theory that can be applied to sustainable agriculture, architecture and community design.

While it started 40 years ago in Australia, permaculture is just now starting to hit a “tipping point” and emerge into mainstream media consciouness. (As it did recently when an actress Ellen Page talked about her permaculture workshop on the Ellen De Generes show.)

Our workshop, produced by Living Mandala, focused on teaching the fundamentals of permaculture in the context of training future leaders of intergenerational ecovillages and intentional communities, so we learned about new systems of organizational management.

As we sat in a beautiful outdoor classroom in the forest, organizational management coach and “evolutionary strategist” Shiloh Boss gave us an intriguing presentation on a new method of leadership called Holocracy. The holacracy concept has evolved out of a startup software company in Philadelphia, Tierney Software.

There are now 100 trained practitioners in Holacracy. “It is an open science, but it is also an open technology available to anyone,” says Boss.

“Meshworks are various organizations or communities that can tackle issues that are insurmountable, like climate change,” she says. “The communities in a sense become an “autonomous body” aligned to a larger purpose.”

It’s like a mushoom mycelium — an organizational meshwork that is intricately interconnected. (By the way, we learned earlier this week from a mycologist that the Mycelium of a mushroom, when mapped out, looks exactly like a map of the Internet.)

Holacracy is hybridized in other meshworks and hierarchies, creating funcational complimentaries that result in stable structures. They are localized, as well as have a strategy of interweaving.  Although meshworks result from the action of many individual and collective decision makers, they take on a life of their own.  They add themselves to individual structures operating at different scales.

Aside from the mesh of communications webs that make up a mushroom mycellium beneath the earth, one clear example of a “meshwork” is social networks like Facebook. This web makes it possible for news to travel like a “virus.”

And there is a spiritual, almost cosmic or psychic interconnectedness to Holacratic structures. Says Boss, “There is actually a larger web of the new world and the new culture, serving the greater world and a greater purpose.”

For example, within the larger network of Facebook are autonomous wholes — generally groups or organizations of 100 to 5,000 people.

In a Holacracy, a coherency of a larger whole can align and govern so that within your circle you self govern, and it’s nested into a larger whole that is always taking in greater information and aligning itself.

There is a larger movement of interconnected, interlinked and overlapping communities,  that can respond and react to the larger issues of the world in a coherent manner.

All interesting to think about, as we begin to form more of a unified and rapid communications “mycellium” amongst ourselves by using mobile devices, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of instantaneous communication forming a “global brain.”

3 comments | posted in blog, Facebook, social media, Twitter, Uncategorized, viral, website

July 13, 2010

“Double Rainbow Guy” proves that just being yourself is the key to viral success.

By Giselle Bisson

The "Double Rainbow Guy" -- You Tube Viral Video Sensation

Who would have thought that a trippy hippie witnessing a pair of colorful streaks in the sky became the newest viral sensation to catch fire on You Tube — with more than 1.5 million views?

Excuse me — 3,702,017.

Recently Fast Company magazine added “The Double Rainbow Guy” to it’s new “Influence Project” — a social experiement to discover the most influential people in America. I think we all expected influence to come from celebrities, media icons or corporations — not a hairy bear like guy living in Yosemite and ooohing and ahhing in ecstasy at something as simple and free as a couple of prisms in the sky.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe being uninhibited, being real, being yourself is all it truly takes to stand out in a world where there is so much posing and posturing and pretending.

Maybe the Rainbow Guy is telling us it’s ok to be real if we want to be noticed. In fact, it’s better.

The Rainbow Guy caught fire on my Facebook page too today, as a lively discussion about the psychology of “The Rainbow Guy” errupted.

Brooks Cole, himself an online media expert, started the conversation:

“FastCompany reports on the Double Rainbow Guy viral phenomenon. What makes this so viral?

My own explanation? I think it mirrors (and leverages) the same human factors that drive sex, along with sex’s power to drive DNA replication, then taken to the power of network technology. I think the viral key is this:

All viral videos have to be:

a) unusually amazing or demonstrably curious in some palpable way that builds curiosity/intensity/amazement to a climax, and:

b) have to provide some tension+release that carries the seed of its own propagation, and:

c) that the speed and success becomes its own amazement factor, multiplying the propagation.”

Karen McKrystal chimed in:

“And then… leverage the viral video to deeper content, transcendent analysis, all for the convergence of activists & thinkers working to bring forth the new society emerging from the ruins and in spite of the ruinous activities of savage capitalism. End of rant.

What I mean is, this whole viral thing, driven by basic motivator sex drive/power, as Brooks suggests, could be leveraged wider, and not be left to the “rainbow” people alone — here for a moment, then gone. Let’s provoke social DNA evolution, helpl nature do what it’s designed to do anyway. Within the human DNA is enfolded the potential for further and further evolution — into potentials yet barely understood and rarely even anticipated.”

Aneline:

“I hadn’t seen this – that’s so great! WOOO-HOOOOO!!!!! ♥”

Karen:

“What, exactly, are you saying is great? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Aneline:

“That FUNTASTIC rainbow video – and the fact that I’m not the only one who feels this way!!! :D ♥ ♥..♪♪♫•*•”

Yes, at least 3.5 million people at last count are either laughing uproariously at the Double Rainbow Guy, or they feel like Aneline.

“WOOOOT WOOOOT !!!!! :D ♥ ☼”

It’s great to see happiness can even more contagious than the latest Britney spears rumor.

Leave a comment | posted in blog, Facebook, renegade marketing, shameless self promotion, social media, Twitter, viral, viral video, you tube

May 21, 2010

Seven ways to get people to join your Facebook Fan Page. (It ain’t easy!)

By Giselle Bisson

My clients are always asking me how they can get more Fans into their Facebook fan page.  I tell them the truth — unless you are an established celebrity (and even if you are) it isn’t easy. It can take a year or more to cultivate a decent Fan Page following.

It’s a dirty little secret that Facebook doesn’t want you to know — you need to have Friends in a personal page first before you can invite them into a Fan page. Therefore, a Fan page is useless unless you have hundreds of Friends First. Or you’re willing to shell out the big bucks for a Facebook ad campaign.

And that’s the plan. it’s intentionally difficult to get friends to Fan your page. Fan pages are more restrictive in features and “share a bility” than regular old friend pages because it’s to Facebook’s benefit to shut you out of this “walled garden”. Your only way “in” is to buy an ad. Brilliant, right?

I figured out how to work around this limitation by creating a “human being page” first before I make a Fan page.

For example, I built a page for a “person” named “Eco Artopia” for my business “Ecoartopia” instead of a fan page. It has virally grown to more than 1,200 friends because my posts as Eco Artopia go out into the stream just like any other person, and the page can have all of the widgets, games and personality of a real person.  There are many more benefits on Facebook as a “person” than you get as a “business.”

For another client, Mystic Garden Party Music Festivals, I built a fake person page as “Mystic Garden.” This grew to 4,800 friends in one year, and is now in danger of tipping the limit of 5,000. We migrated the friends into a new fan page, but people have been reluctant to move to the Fan Page. The fan page still has only 494 fans — 1/10 that of a person page. Given that lots of people abuse their Fan pages and send constant spam to their fans, a lot of people are reluctant to join them.

Here are some tips and tricks to help you entice people to “like” your Fan page:

1. Ask all of the members of your company to invite their personal Facebook friends into the fan page.

Send an email requiring that your employees/coworkers invite their personal friends to the company fan page. Maybe 20% will join, but that will help you get it started.

2. Ask all of your best friends if you can log into their Facebook page and invite their friends into your Fan page (as appropriate.)

It’s tedious work and involves clicking hundreds or thousands of times unless you use this tip:

Separate your Friend list into Subcategories first.

Click on the category to highlight all the friends in that category, and then “select all” and you can email the whole group at once. For example, I split my list into geographic zones whenever I add a new friend. My friends are also divided into professions (ie: sales and marketing, green business), and interests (ie: vegetarians, New Agers) that might benefit specific clients that I’m using the list for when I do a targeted promotional campaign.

3. Hire a Social Media consultant with a big list so they can invite their friends into your Fan page.

I manage and administer about 15 profiles and Fan pages, giving me access to more than 20,000 potential friends that are meticulously categorized across overlapping social circles. This way, whenever I have a new client with a Fan page I want to populate or seed with new potential fans, I can draw from one of these pages for potential friends.

4. Familiarize yourself with your friend’s interests.

One of the magical things about Facebook is that if you don’t know someone, you can guess a lot about them from seeing who their friends are, where their friends overlap your friends, and their listed interests.  Get to know your list well, read all the profiles, and develop a sense of who will and won’t be interested in a potential Fan page or event before you click “send”. Otherwise you are just creating annoying spam for your friends and they might ditch you.

5. Advertise your Fan page everywhere.

On your business card, promo postcards, in your email signature line, Twitter, other social media profiles, print media ads, and with an “Add This” button on your blog entries and web pages. (WordPress now has new templates with built in “Share This” features that make this super easy.)

6. Whenever you meet a new business contact, ask them if they’re on Facebook.

Jot their page names down on their card. When you get back to the office, immediately add them to your Friend page so you can invite them to your Fan page. all, just separate your “real” friends from the “virtual” and “networking” friends and message them separately.

7. Your network is your net worth!  Don’t limit your friend list to actual friends.

Every person you meet is the key to your future! You never know when a contact will be valuable. I am constantly surprised and have often found that total strangers on my Facebook page who offer to “friend” me often become my most valuable business connections, or develop into true, real world friends.

Developing a Fan page following on Facebook takes time and patience, but you’ll be rewarded again and again with the connections and customers you’ll gain. Remember that what your fan page looks like and the quantity of people is no where near as important as the quality of people who follow it, and keeping them engaged with intriguing daily updates. But more about that in a future article.

1 comment   |  tags: , , | posted in blog, Facebook, networking events, renegade marketing, schmoozing, Uncategorized

May 5, 2010

Social media is not for everybody.

By Giselle Bisson

Who needs social media anyway?

The other day I ran into an man in Peet’s cafe. He introduced himself as a seasoned marketing professional.  I told him I was too — but that I specialize in social media.

He spat out vehemently:  “Most of social media is pure bullsh*t for my clients.”

Maybe he’s right…for his clients it might be a waste of time. (Maybe his clients are all computer illiterate, over 60, still use a landline or are Luddites who don’t trust ATM machines yet either.)

For a few, select businesses, like lawyers, (unless they deal with high profile cases), or people with government or corporate jobs (unless they are company spokespersons), or arms dealers, or private detectives, or anyone with a security clearance, it’s probably better to keep a very low or non-existent social media profile.

But if you’re a business that would be listed in the Yellow Pages, if you’re a business that would have  a business card, if you’re a business that would get written up in the newspaper, if you do your business online and especially if you’re a current or aspiring public figure — Social Media is  your new calling card.

Social media, like PR, is not for everyone.

Not everyone wants to be famous, and not every business needs a public profile. Some businesses are better off quietly working their sales team, Rolodex and one-on-one relationships. For example, if your customers don’t use the Internet, then you won’t find them here either.

But if you run any business with an online presence, and if you want visibility,  then social media is for you.

Social media campaigns are also critically important for most small town “Mom and Pop” businesses like restaurants, bed and breakfast inns, hair salons, moving companies and the like — because getting listed in Yelp! and showing up on the Yahoo or Google Map is now more important than a Yellow Pages listing. (Yellow what? Who, under the age of 65, uses the phone book anymore?)

And for that reason, social media is quickly becoming a tool in the marketing/PR professional’s arsenal — to complement speaking engagements, press tours, article placement, trade shows and the like.

I’ve been doing traditional print and broadcast PR for more than 20 years. But social media is by far, the easiest, cheapest, fastest, most effective promotional tool I’ve ever used.

Better than email. Better than newspaper ads. Better than brochures and postcards. Much better than a website that nobody ever finds or reads. Faster and thus sometimes even more effective than traditional news media press relations.

For some businesses, like doctors, dentists, real estate agents, authors, consultants and especially small businesses and sole proprietors, it can bring you a whole new level of visibility.

And for others, like artists, musicians, performers, workshop leaders or anyone who throws events, it’s downright essential.

But if you’re still reading a newspaper, listening to the radio and using  a landline, maybe Social Media is not for you.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Facebook, public relations, renegade marketing, seo, social media, Twitter, Uncategorized, website

March 17, 2010

Will Facebook eclipse Google for search?

By Giselle Bisson

Facebook, the new kid on the block, overtook Google as the most popular website in the US this week.

My friends are early adopters. Last year at this time, whenever I walked into an Internet cafe and peered over the laptops, I saw that majority of the browsers were open to Facebook. The rest were using search engines like Google, photo sharing communities like Flickr, and free email portals like Yahoo mail.

Now, this week, the rest of the world caught up with my early adopter friends — the social media site Facebook has overtaken Google for the first time, becoming the most popular website.  According to the Social Media Examiner, five new studies have verified my casual Internet Cafe research.

The Financial Times reported that Google and Facebook accounted for 14 per cent of all internet traffic last week, with Facebook receiving 7.03 per cent and Google 7 per cent.

While the lead is slight, the upward trajectory is clear. It should be more than enough to convince online businesses to immediately shift more of their ad dollars into Facebook ads. And businesses, whether online or off, can no longer ignore the value of marketing to their customers and communities via Facebook Fan pages, Event pages or Groups.

More people are starting to filter their news through people they trust — friends who point them in the direction of interesting articles and trends on social sites like Facebook or Twitter — and fewer are using search engines like Yahoo, Google and Ask to find news and information.  People are also paying much less attention to their overwhelming and overloaded email in boxes — and more time sending messages to each other on Social Networks instead.

In a sense, social nets are turning into both a replacement for email and a new kind of specialized search engine, with human beings, rather than page ranks, deciding what information is hip, interesting and important.

Simultaneously, marketers are scrambling to shift their budgets from print/radio/TV PR over to Social Media marketing. Job openings for “Social Media Gurus” are proliferating — so if you’re in the sales, marketing, video, advertising, graphic design or media professions, you need to get up to speed and shift your business immediately to include the social sphere.

PR agencies, also, are quickly repositioning as Social Media agencies. From small local businesses, to the Fortune 500, social marketing is hot, hot, hot — and the newspaper is not, not, not.

It tipped. In the mid 90s, everyone needed an online campaign. Somewhere around the year 2002, every business suddenly needed a website. Now, we’re seeing the same urgency for all businesses to have a Social Media presence.

The average American spent 7 hours on Facebook in January. (Heck, my friends spend 7 hours a day on Facebook, and hardly ever use email anymore.)  Facebook doubled from 200 million to 400 million users last year — giving it a user base the size of the third largest country on the planet!  For the time being, we can’t afford to ignore Facebook. But in the future? Who knows.

Social media sites come and they go. (Remember all the hype about Friendster, once upon a time? Remember the Well? Remember Tribe? Remember Compuserve?) but whether Facebook remains the front runner or gets replaced something new, Social Media is the media, just as the Internet is business.

Ignore social media at your peril. It’s not going away.

1 comment | posted in Facebook, MySpace, public relations, renegade marketing, social media, Twitter

March 13, 2010

Why the only website worth having is a blog.

By Giselle Bisson

I was having a new business meeting with a client yesterday. He has a restaurant and he’s looking for ways to stay on top of the economic downturn.

The first problem: Nobody can find his restaurant. First, it’s in an obscure location in San Francisco. His website in also on an obscure location on the Interent — buried somewhere in 6.5 billion web pages.

I typed the restaurant name in Google.

It didn’t show up.

I scrolled, scrolled and scrolled through pages and couldn’t find it.

I typed it in quotes.

Still. Nothing.

I typed in the name of his restaurant, plus the keywords: San Francisco. Vegetarian food. Italian. Pizza. Pasta.  The address.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

And finally I just went to the site. It was one of those static websites. It screamed: “We’re gonna party like it’s 1999.” It was so static that there was not a single word of type on the entire site that Google would ever be able to find. It was all pictures and graphics! And of course, it had never been updated. (The way Google ranks you  higher in the search results is by how often you update your information.)

I said: “That’s why you need a blog, not a website.” Because blogs are filled with keywords that Google can find — and they’re updated much more often than websites so they end up higher in the search results.

We then searched for this blog, Visibility Shift.

Out of 8,000,000 results for “visibility shift”, Visibility Shift is the first one on the list in Google! In fact 6 of the first 10 hits refer to it.

I said: “I built the page yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes, it immediately got to the top of Google because I built a Twitter following first. I sent 850 Twitters out first and they’ve been retweeted thousands of times, along with the words ‘visibility shift’ in the URL.”

“And I have 11 articles in the blog already, and they’ve been picked up by thousands of spiders and bots and RSS feeds and search engines and are already reappearing on dozens of other websites.”

This blog has already generated more traffic in the first week than my old static website got in a year.

We looked for my other blog, which has been on the web for 5 years. It has a very generic name, so it generates a ridiculous number of results when you try to find it. (A mistake I’ll never make again when naming a blog.)

Even so, out of 451,000,000 results (nearly half a billion) it’s number two in Google!

It’s received a fairly respectable 200,000 visits in the past 5 years. I’ve done a lot of search engine submissions, and Twitter, and link exchanges. But another eason the search rank is so high is because it’s hosted on Google’s Blogger — which automatically gives it a higher search rank than my static website will ever have.

Blogs are much easier to find than webpages.

This was a good lesson in those fancy terms marketers like to use — SEO and SEM.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) organizes the pages on the website for both the search engine spiders and the visitors to the site. Search engines look for your site based on combinations of words on the site. The more words you have on your site, the easier it is to find. That’s why a blog is so much more effective than a static webpage.

“Oh!” he said.

Now, Search engine marketing (SEM) are the things you do off the website to bring more traffic toward it. These are like putting your URL on business cards, restaurant reviews in an online news site,  press releases with your URL and company name in them, and anything else that generates incoming traffic and links — which moves site pages higher in search engine results pages.

You want things that spread your URL around the web — like Twitter, a public Facebook listing, and links from blogs and online zines — or review sites like Yelp!

See, I said, “that’s why social media, press coverage and blogs are way, way, way more important to your business now than an old static website will ever be.”

And this is why if you have a business that depends on your customer being able to find you on the Internet when they’re hankering for pasta, you need to have the words: “Italian restaurant and San Francisco” show up as many times as possible on your blog–so Google can find those words.

I said, “You know, this is totally cheating, but we could just rename your new blog: ‘Italian-restaurant-pasta-sanfrancisco.com.’” That will be a lot more unique and useful than the generic name of his restaurant.

“What a great idea!” he said.

“That’s available in Go Daddy and will cost you only $4.99. Plus my monthly retainer.”

He was sold. I got the job. We’re building a blog and a Facebook fan page this week. I’m looking forward to seeing his restaurant turn into a destination restaurant — one of those obscure restaurants people love to drive across the city to discover and show off to friends.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in blog, Facebook, renegade marketing, search engine optimization, seo, social media, Twitter, website, Wordpress

March 13, 2010

Social media — it’s just a very, very short story

By Giselle Bisson

Social media is nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a story.

A very, very short story.

In the world of PR, you send out a press release once a month, maybe if you’re in the Fortune 500, once a week.

And you wait  and wait … and wait and hope and pray and wait for the press to write and publish it in the news.

Which for a daily newspaper could happen instantly. And for a weekly or monthly magazine could take months, even a year.

And then by the time your audience read the story, and responded, in a letter to the editor, a lot of things could have changed. Your story might not even reflect the truth anymore by then.

And your customer just really wasn’t hearing much about you, because if the news media didn’t deem you newsworthy, (which is most of the time) your story never got told at all.

So if you wanted to tell the story, you could only tell a very, very short story, in a paid advertisement.

But in new the world of social media what matters most is telling a soundbite-sized elevator pitch of a story — in just one or two lines of copy. Every day. Sometimes several times a day.

And seeing how your audience reacts.

And then you can respond, change your product, change your message – immediately. I mean, like in seconds.

This very short story over time becomes a longer story that will draw your audience, the customer, and engage them in a conversation.

Reputation building and relationships happen at warp speed this way–and they happen publicly.

Leave a comment | posted in Facebook, MySpace, press release, public relations, search engine optimization, social media, Twitter, Wordpress

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