Eggblogg

Are Rose & Adelson digging their grave?

Over the past two days there has been a great commotion in the Digging world and my word but it’s been fascinating to observe! For those people that aren’t heavily involved in the social media scene this is what’s been going down…

Yesterday Digg 'launched a new algorithm to try and prevent groups of users from gaming the system.' This sounds perfectly reasonable to me but then again I’m not a top digger...

I do understand that Digg wants to give new people a chance to get on the front page, but don’t these people who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to Digg deserve some recognition for it? It seems to have been the last straw for top Diggers who feel they are being penalised and that Digg is no longer a democratic news site. They retaliated by writing an open letter to Digg airing these and other grievances. Understandable, I think, under the circumstances!

I think the worst of it has to be the wide spread complaints about the lack of communication from Digg. Of course they deny this fervently and say that they don’t intend to ignore messages sent to them and that they hope to put in place a method of two-way communication to alleviate these complaints, blah blah… But surely this should have been in place a long time ago!? Is it just me or are these people just playing a very dangerous game?

On a site like Digg, where we can have our say at anytime, with access to a great big audience, would it not be wise for Rose and Adelson to open up the doors of communication a little more? Shouldn’t they have communicated with Digg users before it got this far? Maybe they would have saved themselves a little of the negative publicity. What do you think? I would really appreciate your comments because it just baffles me!

What does 'online marketing' mean to a small business?

"I'm in online marketing." It's a conversation stopper. Unless you're at a Wired Sussex networking event. It's true that most small businesses these days have a web presence of some sort, and they're aware they need to be doing well on Google. But sometimes that's as far as it goes, especially if they went to a web designer who added 'website promotion' to the service description for another hundred quid.

Fact is, getting the right visitors to your website and converting them into customers now involves a complex set of activities and real strategic thinking. Or, as Lee Odden's suggests in his recent post Recession Proof SEO Tips,  "effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane." Sensibly, small biz clients don't really care about the details, and even less about the jargon that goes with it. They're more bothered with results. How to break that down? Well, you could start with the desired result and work backwards.

Let's say you have a website which sells your goods or services. That means people want what you're selling and are able to buy. That means you have a website that works and a product or service for which there's a demand. If people are even on the website that means they need to have typed in your URL or arrived there from somewhere else. That means they have either heard of your company and URL or they've seen a link to you on the web and followed it. That means you've either done some traditional marketing already or there are links to your site on the web, in places where those potentially interested people were browsing or searching.

Where should those links be? How do we get them? How many do we need? What should they say? How do we know our prospects will see them and follow them? What other forms of promotion do we need to be doing? We've got the visitors - why won't they buy? How can we do all this without spending a fortune? Um... you need the help of an online marketer!

Tis the season to be talking

Those of us lucky enough to be together with family and friends over the next week or so will no doubt be doing some of that good old human activity known as catching up. Finding out what's been going on in other people's lives, comparing notes, turning off for a short while from the daily treadmill. In other words, talking. You know. That stuff we used to do before texting, emailing and Facebooking took over.

And whether or not we mean to, many of us will be doing a bit of unpaid marketing. I've already done some today myself. My mother was impressed with the boxed gift that I'd received from my brother, delivered from M & S in time for Christmas. "That's a good idea!" The rest of the phone call consisted of me explaining how easy it was to order online, how you can have it giftwrapped ... the only thing I couldn't tell her was the price.

Marketers have long held positive 'word of mouth' to be the ultimate marketing tool. It's fabulously persuasive, it's authentic and it's free. But the negative variety is just as powerful, and word of mouth can't be controlled. In a similar way, the marketing potential of online social media has yet to be proven. Perhaps we need to put more energy into playing the game rather than controlling it.

Having said that, here's what Doug Meacham has to say about Participation Ethos as a Real Business Model ...

Mapping the media landscape

Still on the subject of tools, here's Deborah Schultz's map of the tools available in the social media landscape...  itself a useful tool.

I find conceptual maps interesting in that they say as much about the author's viewpoint as about the landscape itself. I look at this and picture one or two 'here be dragons' labels.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it's Social Media

I have a confession to make: ten years ago my introduction to the internet was in the form of an online community for history lovers. We each created our own avatars, took on Roman, Greek or Egyptian family names, and cavorted around the various special interest message boards and chatrooms all day and all night. I made pretend friends and real friends; some I even met IRL (as they say). I learned fluent emoticon-ese, took part in online arguments, role-played, formed some groups, joined others, attended virtual weddings and parties, created banners and avatars for fellow citizens and learnt basic HTML.

It wasn't called social networking back then, but it certainly wasn't Dungeons and Dragons.

Things have come full circle for me now, as this kind of online connection-building (funny how it's not called 'virtual' any more) has been re-invented as the Phenomenon That Is Social Media. This time around it has real commercial possibilities, which is why marketers are so excited about it.

At Eggbox, we don't claim to be at the cutting edge of social media marketing, but we learn new things every day. It's knowledge we're accruing on behalf of our small business clients who want to know about it and be a part of. Not only that, but given my own 'history' in the area of online community (I even used to write academic papers on the subject) it seems like a natural fit. So here we are, getting our feet wet but hopefully our noses not too dirty.

On the face of it there's a lot to learn (not least of all the language of tagging, pinging, digging and pimping...) but I agree with Geoff Livingston when he talks about a social media strategy requiring a blend of PR, traditional marketing and old-fashioned relationship-building networking skills ... in particular, word-of-mouth. Bring it on!