Prescient Digital Media’s The State of the Social Intranet 2012 report delves into the state of enterprise Intranets, their functionality and, most importantly, how employees use them (and feel about them). And when it comes to employee Intranet satisfaction, well, it’s not very widespread. Here’s a closer look:

Only 22% of organizations rate employee satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.17% of organizations rate executive satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good, and only 19% of organizations rate their overall satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good. Bottom line, at all levels of the enterprise, satisfaction with Intranets is pretty dismal. And when it comes to employees at all levels, we all know that if they don’t like it, they don’t use it.

Forrester’s study published this past February entitled “SharePoint Enters Its Awkward Teenage Years” also substantiates the basic findings discussed here and, more importantly, explores whether SharePoint, the key component of many enterprise companies’ social and content operations, has what it takes to deliver on customers’ needs for mobile, cloud and social now and in the future.

If you’re an enterprise company using an Intranet system, this might be an opportune time to examine your employee satisfaction with the tools. Many Intranets include social components like blogs, discussion forums, wikis and commenting and are often precursors to external adoption. For many of our clients, we find that a company Intranet can be a training ground for employees, managers and senior leaders to understand how to interact socially amongst one another and teach them the basic premises of blogging and sharing thought leadership in a “comfortable” space. Thus, Intranets can play a big role when it comes to getting your team members comfortable with content creation and social networking and engagement.

My take? Companies that understand the importance of creating a dynamic Intranet experience for their employees can ultimately make the transition from internal social to external social exponentially easier. As with anything, it takes the commitment and buy-in of senior leaders, spending money to buy the right kind of system, investing in ongoing training and support and making a commitment to continual change and adaptation as the web continues to force growth and capability online.

And as you decide what system to implement and/or upgrade to, don’t overlook the power and importance of gathering feedback from your employees and execs. Remember to reach out to your connection base on LinkedIn and in other peer groups and ask people about their experiences. You’ll find plenty of SharePoint users, because up to now that’s been the choice of IT leaders, but you’ll likely also find Yammer users, as well as advocates of Jive, Box, IBM and Google.

Like any digital tool, a company Intranet is something that constantly evolves to better serve users, so it’s important to make sure you’re giving your employees a platform that works beyond document collaboration and delivers a user experience that makes your team members excited about using it instead of groaning at the thought.

Are you surprised by the study findings? Are you an Intranet user? Which one and how do you like it?

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Your Employees Likely Hate Your Intranet: Here’s Why is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The free MarketingProfs seminar kicks off at 1 p.m. ET on May 30. And, as is typical with MarketingProfs events, this (free!!) seminar is a veritable powerhouse of information and actionable tips that will help you and your B2B brand reinvent and reinvigorate your content strategy.

After all, creating enough content to sustain an effective content marketing strategy takes serious work. And time. And resources. And if you’re short on the last two, well, it can make implementing a content strategy downright difficult. Don’t stress. That’s where we come in.

Yours truly, along with Amanda Maksymiw of Lattice Engines, Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion and moderator Corey O’Loughlin of MarketingProfs will draw from our content and client experience to teach you several things, including:

• How to create stories that are rooted in your brand and resonate with customers across a variety of social channels and distribution programs
• How to plan for and organize your content creation in a way that you can sustain, repeat and track
• How to decide which channels mean the most to you and your company and leverage them

I can already see you perking up. Regardless of your budget and resources, you can create an effective content marketing strategy—and if you can carve out time in your schedule on May 30, we’ll show you how.

Hop over to MarketingProfs and register now for the 60-minute seminar. Seriously? It’s free and only an hour? You’ve got no excuse not to join us, so mark your calendars now.

And in the meantime, I’d love to know more about your B2B content marketing pain points. What’s stressing you out? What do you want to fix? What do you wish you could do better?

Image: jDevaun via Compfight cc

[Seminar] Become A B2B Content Brand With Limited Resources is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

He then shared pragmatic use cases on rolling out an advocacy program, walked through research on best practices and pitfalls from leading brand programs and discussed how to measure success. Scott shared his social media team’s strategy in launching an employee advocacy program to 90,000 tax professionals across 10,000 retail offices.

H&R Block’s case study is one of the few formalized employee advocacy programs for large Fortune 500 companies. Zena highlighted two key elements of employee advocacy in social media: 1) Content marketing and 2) Gamification mechanics, then walked through the benefits of Expion’s employee amplification browser plug-in, Social Advocator.

Listen to the recorded webinar:

Here are the webinar slides:

Want to learn more about Expion’s Social Advocator? Set up a demo today!

Zena Weist is the Vice President of Strategy at Expion. She is an integrated media strategist with over 17 years of executive leadership in online marketing on both the agency and brand side, providing digital communications and social media strategic counsel across a portfolio of Fortune 500 companies. Zena has led award-winning interactive teams at Edelman, H&R Block, Sprint, Hallmark and Embarq, providing leadership in online brand engagement, digital strategy, and integrated marketing communications. When her fingers aren’t on the keyboard, Zena is playing with her family of four active kids plus one adorable husband or trying to sneak in a run.

This post originally appeared on Expion’s blog

Altimeter Joined H&R Block And Expion To Chat Employees and Amplification is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the best uses of B2B mobile marketing so that you can apply some of the ideas to your business. But before we get started, let’s recap a few mobile marketing statistics so that you can better understand why B2B mobile marketing is becoming so critical in today’s world.

Check out these statistics compiled by BarnRaisers.com:

• 96% of marketers currently use or are planning to incorporate mobile into their mix
• 85% report an intent to raise their mobile budgets in the near future
• 84% use mobile websites; 78% mobile search; 76% mobile apps and 75% mobile display ads
• 42% are concerned about having proper mobile metrics in place
• 42% report an ability to prove ROI
• Only 21% state they have been successful in mobile – a decrease from 2010

Now you’re convinced, right? If you’re still unsure of how exactly to go about implementing a B2B mobile marketing strategy, here are 15 ideas to get you started:

Create A Mobile Website

This is the foundation for all mobile marketing, so if you don’t have a mobile website yet, we’d encourage you to create one. Surprisingly, it’s not all that complex. You can either work with a firm like Mobilize Worldwide or BlueTrain Mobile, both of whom specialize in creating mobile websites. Or, if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can read How to Create a Mobile Website on the 60 Second Marketer blog.

Find Out How Your B2B Mobile Website Stacks Up

Marketing Grader is HubSpot’s upgrade to their Website Grader tool. Included in the tool is a mobile grader that can give you insights to how well your mobile website is performing. Another useful tool is MobileGrader from our friends at BlueTrain Mobile. Both tools are worth checking out.

Generate A QR Code

QR codes won’t be around forever, but they can still be used to engage B2B audiences. Ready to create one? Use a simple QR Code Generator to create a code that you can tie into a promotion, a landing page, a limited-time download or some other digital perk.

Drop A QR Code into Your Next PowerPoint Presentation

When I do keynote speeches at trade shows and corporations around the globe, I drop a QR code into the presentation. The first person to scan the code gets an autographed copy of Go Mobile. It’s a great way to engage an audience via mobile marketing.

Add A QR Code to Your Business Card

Again, QR codes won’t be around forever, but if you add them to your business cards, they can help you stand out from your competitors. You might even consider designing a special landing page with your contact information and other pertinent resources. Just be sure you test the final destination to ensure that it’s optimized for a mobile experience, otherwise the QR code won’t be nearly as effective.

Link Mobile Banner Ads to Email Campaigns

You can run a mobile banner ad that, when clicked, creates an email instead of loading a web page. So, for example, when a person clicks on a banner ad from their smartphone, an email pops up on their screen that they can forward to friends. In a B2C marketing plan, the email might have a discount at a local restaurant or bar. For B2B companies, you could offer a limited-time download of a particularly compelling whitepaper, or discounted registration to an upcoming industry event. For more information on this technique, check out some of the case studies on the MobClix website.

Create A Mobile Banner Ad That Only Targets Certain Demographics

Did you know that you can create a mobile banner ad campaign that only targets people in airports? Or only people who have visited ESPN.com (or some other website) in the past 2 weeks? Or only people who use the Android, iOS or Microsoft operating system? Yup. It’s crazy easy to do, too. Just ask your ad agency or mobile ad network to show you how.

Run A Mobile Banner Ad That Adds An Event To The Visitor’s Calendar

This is another fun trick that the folks at MobClix created and it works like this: someone visiting a mobile website sees a mobile banner ad on their smartphone. The banner ad is for your company and it says, “Mark Your Calendar For Our Upcoming Seminar!” When the user clicks on your banner ad, the event is automatically added to their calendar. Pretty cool, eh?

Create A Customized App For Your Event Or Trade Show

AppMakr helped The Inc. 500 Conference create an app that enabled attendees to navigate the conference with ease. It was a great way for the event to stay connected with their audience. If you’re considering creating your own event app, you might include a schedule, a map of the conference center and suggestions for nearby points of interest so that attendees have all of the resources they need in their hands.

Launch An SMS Campaign

Only 6% to 15% of all mobile phone users in the U.S. have QR code readers on their phones, but virtually 100% of them can read texts. Launching an SMS campaign is crazy easy — but you’ll have to go through an SMS service provider like SumoText to get it going. And another tip? Create a plan before you start blasting texts to your audience. This form of messaging, while effective, can quickly become spammy, so you want to be sure that each message as a clear and concise purpose and call to action.

Use SMS To Stay In Touch With Customers

Airlines, accountants and real estate agents are using SMS to remind customers about their flights, appointments and meetings. It’s a great way to stay connected and keep people happy, and something you might consider depending on what business you’re in.

Grab A Star Star Code

Remember all those people who got in early on the 1-800 craze? They grabbed numbers like 1-800-INSURANCE and sold them back to insurance companies at a premium. The same might be happening with Star Star codes, which allow people to dial **INSURANCE (or something else) to connect with brands. I’m not necessarily advocating that you snatch up a bunch of industry-related Star Star codes just to make a tidy profit, but you might consider purchasing one that connects directly to your industry or company and incorporating it into your marketing materials so that people have an easy way to remember your contact information.

Integrate Your Social Media Campaigns With Mobile

Social networking is becoming an increasingly large part of the mobile online experience, so don’t overlook these channels as you plan your own B2B mobile marketing strategy. Are you serving up content on your social networks that’s optimized for your mobile users? And does some of that content help drive users back to your mobile-optimized website? Don’t hesitate to grab your own smartphone and surf around your website and your various social networks to get a firsthand look at how other mobile users view your digital presence (and adjust as needed).

Run A Mobile Paid Search Campaign

Mobile paid search is a hidden goldmine. It’s hard to make a killing with desktop search these days, thanks to the high cost of keywords. Yet the cost for mobile search remains low (for now), which means you’ll likely get great ROI on your investment.

Update Your Online Listings

As more people use their smartphones to search the Internet for information, it’s more important than ever for your business to be as visible as possible. One quick way to do this? Make sure you’ve updated your online listings with the correct location, contact information and other pertinent details. A B2B company likely won’t include the same information as a B2C company, but you still have prospective clients that might want to find you, right? Make it as easy as possible for them to get the information they need when they need it.

What other B2B mobile marketing ideas have you tried?

Jamie Turner is the Founder of 60 Second Communications and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

Image: William Hook via Compfight cc

B2B Mobile Marketing: 15 Ideas You Can Use Today is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Facebook community management takes a lot of skills: writing, editing, customer service, some degree of tech savvy and a knack for conversation, among others. Think you need to take your community management to the next level? Try these tips, straight from the mouths of the amazing people I’m lucky to have on the V3 team. We pretty much live Facebook (not to mention all things digital), so we crowdsourced this question amongst our team and hope we can offer you some helpful perspective that you can apply to your own Facebook pages. Without further ado, meet some of our community managers and see what they have to say about their respective keys to success with Facebook community management.

Be Present

The most important aspect of being a successful community manager is to be present. No matter what anyone says, there’s no autopilot or set-it-and-forget-it mode. It’s also important to understand your audience. Know when they are online and how they use your online information. Are they looking for customer support, industry news, upcoming events/trends? It goes without saying, but use your analytics to determine what kinds of posts get the best reaction and when your optimal engagement times are. –Jen Bradshaw

Make It Personal

Even if you’re representing a brand or company, don’t forget to be personal. Every business, after all, is comprised of people—and that personality should be reflected on your Facebook page. Have fun. Make jokes. Be conversational and approachable. Ditch the corporate speak and post content that makes your audience take notice, helps them solve problems and keeps them informed and entertained. Your company has a personality and a story—and Facebook is an ideal platform on which to show your customers, fans and audience exactly who you are and why they should pay attention to you. –Katy Schamberger

Customer Service Is Key

If they’re upset, I try to empathize, remember a time when I had a customer service debacle and get in their shoes. I also try to remember that it’s hard to really understand tone in the written word. I may think a customer is being snippy when really it wasn’t their intention to come across that way at all. I always remember to realize that someone might just be having a bad day and their interaction with me might be the one thing that turns it all around. I never, ever forget that I’m dealing with a human being on the other side of this interaction. –Jenny Rapson

The Power of Listening

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time meeting new people and learning about how they interact and the one lesson I’ve learned over and over has been to listen. A good community manager listens to their community; to the individuals and the group as a whole. You have to be willing to listen to the voices of the individual while also keeping the entire community in mind. It’s important to remember that YOU are not the community, but rather the liaison between the brand and the community. –Amanda Henson

Stay Engaged

With so many available scheduling and automation tools, it’s sometimes hard to stay truly engaged on Facebook.  These tools are handy and play a key role in getting content and information shared. Yet if you don’t keep up with the day-to-day activity, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to engage with fans and build your network. –Libby Hastert

Although these tips are specific to Facebook, most of them apply to any social network. After all, community management is called that for a reason—you’re managing and building a community, and that’s something that takes daily work and insight in order to succeed.

What else would you add to the list?

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How To Be A Better Facebook Community Manager is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

I know that when we do content audits for prospective clients, in many instances we find that the content they’re writing is good enough content, it’s just not getting read. And it goes without saying that if it’s not getting read, it’s not getting shared. And the two, well, they pretty much go hand in hand.

In this year’s BrightEdge survey, 31% of marketers said that social sharing of content as a means to improve rank will be much more important in 2013 as compared to 2012. Additionally, 33% indicated it’s much more important to understand the correlation between social sharing of your pages and rank for these pages in 2013, as compared to 2012. We agree. Social sharing plays a critical role in credibility not only of your content in general, but also of your website or blog as a whole. Shares speak to interest, credibility, reach and trust—all important components of search.

So now that social sharing is being viewed as an increasingly important SEO signal, where are marketers spending their time? The BrightEdge survey indicates that a majority (86%) will focus on Facebook sharing. Google+, comes in at second with 68% of the vote, followed by LinkedIn (43%) and Twitter (41%).

Although sharing itself is critical, most search marketers said that it’s more important this year to identify trending topics in social media, creating a pool of data that will drive sharing for relevant topics—and, as a result, boost rank. Geek talk for don’t underestimate the importance of monitoring and the use of listening tools, identifying trends and keywords being used and SEO’ing your content (social and otherwise) and distributing it appropriately.

I found this study especially interesting because it underscores the importance of search, content and social and how they all work together as a part of your integrated marketing strategy to drive results. Poorly written, non-relevant content will fail, no matter what tactics are in place to share it across the web. And conversely, well-written, contextually relevant, SEO optimized content that is shared across multiple channels by credible individuals and outlets—that’s going to produce results. One phrase I often say when I’m presenting on this topic is especially relevant: How do you know you’re doing it right? If it’s good for people, it’s good for Google. Think of your content, how you write it, optimize it and share it, in that way. And if it’s good for people, it’ll be good for The Google.

Interested in even more data? Make sure you check out the complete 2013 Search Marketer Survey results—that’s what I call the best kind of leisure reading!

What’s your take on these survey results? Have you seen any sort of SEO boost from consistent social sharing? And if not, is this something that’s on your radar screen this year?

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Report: Social Sharing Likely To Improve Search Rank is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The next time you’re writing a blog post, use these 6 tips as a pre-publish checklist:

Optimize Your Page Title

The page title (also known as a meta title) is an important element of optimizing your blog post and it should be unique for every post.

Use the Google keyword tool to do some research regarding what keyword you want to optimize based on and then include these keywords within your title. You might discover an opportunity to include multiple keyword combinations, which is great because you have a chance of ranking on Google for multiple terms.

The title is displayed on search results so it’s important that this is not just a list of keywords. If you wrote a blog post on optimizing your website to improve speed the title could be:

“How to Optimize Your Website To Improve Speed”

But if you use the Google keyword tool to do some keyword research, you’d see that ‘website speed optimization’ is searched 720 times per month.

So you could change the title to the following:

Website Speed Optimization: How to Improve Your Website Speed

In this title, the keywords are at the start because Google gives priority to words at the start of a title.

Action: Review your page titles and optimize!

Share Your Content on SlideShare

SlideShare is a social network for businesses initially designed for sharing slides but has since expanded to include documents, videos and much more.

When you upload content to SlideShare it gets indexed within seconds and there’s a good chance of getting ranked well on Google. You may not be able to rank for your content on your own site but you could rank for content on SlideShare.  Just make sure to have a clear call to action at the end to bring people back to your website!

Creating a presentation based on your blog post is not creating new content. You’re simply presenting your blog post content in a different format, which means you can get someone else to create the presentation for you if needed.

Action: Read Todd Wheatland’s excellent book, The Marketers Guide to Slideshare, and upload relevant blog content as a presentation on SlideShare.

Optimize Your Images

If you’re optimizing your blog post based on a particular keywords or a set of keywords (which, of course, you are, as we already discussed), make sure at least one of your images is targeted at these keywords. And another tip? Check to be sure you’re using relevant keywords for all images.

When you upload images, consider the following:

Name of Image: Uploading an image called 13255.jpg does not help Google, so make sure you use appropriate keywords in the name.

Title: Write a good title and caption for your image. Although this doesn’t necessarily help with ranking, it will improve the click-through rate for that image.

Alt Tag: An alt tag is something that Google reads to help it understand what the image is about. This is another critical spot for keywords that speak to your blog content and the most important image element.

Image Size: When you’re uploading an image, size it appropriately. For example, if you upload a large image but decide to display it a small area, then the image will be adjusted in dimensions but not in actual size.

Action: Consider images as an important part of optimization.

Get External Links To The Post

When you create a new post on your site, there’s no other site linking to this post. When websites of authority link to this blog, the post becomes more valuable and more likely to rank higher for your search term. And if sites link to the post using terms you want to optimize (or similar terms), this will also help boost your visibility. As you write or proofread your blog, check to be sure you have a few internal and external links. You don’t want to include a ton of internal links, as that looks spammy. Instead, make sure you’re directing your readers to the resources that they need (internal or external).

Action: Review your posts to see if you can improve internal linking.

Get Internal Links To The Post

External links are important elements of any blog post, as are internal links to related resources or previous posts. Not only do internal links help Google find the post, they’ll also help boost your website’s link authority–and that also makes Google happy.

Share Your Post On Google +

Google + is becoming increasingly important in Google search. Google doesn’t index all content on Google+, but as you build up your profile, your chances of getting a post indexed are higher. And that means you should make Google+ sharing a priority and encourage others to +1 your content (as you do the same for them, of course). Keep in mind that when you share to Google+, the first line of the blog post will be used as the page title, another reason it’s so important to include keywords in your first sentence.

Action:  If you’re not up to speed on Google+, start following Ray Hiltz, Mark Traphagen or Amanda Blain.

These are a few ways that you can help optimize your blog content so that it appears higher in search results. What other tips would you add to the list?

How To Move Your Blog Post Up In Search Results is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Channels offers more than 20 broader topic areas including Your Career, Economy, Social Impact, Innovation and Higher Education, among others. Once you follow a channel, you’ll automatically get updates directly in your home page feed on LinkedIn’s desktop site.

The new feature is part of a revamp of LinkedIn Today, which also has a new look that’s designed to more prominently feature the site’s influencer blog network. If you’re interested in following an influencer, you can access tabs at the top of the page to take a look at the complete network and see top influencer posts of the day.

What’s more? Your tailored news page now features an image-centric design that more closely mirrors the profile layout. Plus, your email digests will incorporate additional content, too, including top influencer posts, trending professional news and Slideshare content.

You probably already know we are big fans of LinkedIn, both for personal use and for our clients. And we like the direction they’ve been headed with recent changes, dating back to the acquisition of Slideshare. The introduction of Channels and the overall modification of the site’s content experience is a clear signal that LinkedIn is paying attention to how people use the site—and that they’ve realized that content is becoming an increasingly important part of the platform. More importantly, it’s clear that LinkedIn wants to give users reasons to come back to and interact with the site as much as possible. That’s pretty smart.

After all, LinkedIn isn’t just a place to build your professional network—it’s also an ideal source of industry-related information, and LinkedIn is making it even easier to stay up with the topics that are important to you and your clients.

What’s your take? Have you used Channels? And do you think changes like this are effective steps in improving the overall LinkedIn experience?

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LinkedIn Channels: Deepening User Connections to Content is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Understanding blog post optimization and doing your homework before you write your post can go a long way toward making sure your blog content attracts readers. Sometimes when I say that “writing is the easy part” thing, writers get all bristly (and yes, it’s a word if I say it is), but it’s true.

There are lots of people out there writing some terrific stuff, but attracting readers often has nothing to do with how great your writing is. Knowing how to write for the web, which is completely different than other types of writing, knowing how to optimize your posts and understanding the importance of building your networks can make all the difference in the world. And that, my friends, is how you get more blog readers. Let’s talk about why.

Know Your Audience

Good things don’t just happen; most times, they take work. The same is true of your corporate blogging efforts and how they relate to consumer behavior. Know your audience. Ask yourself what information they need to do their jobs better. Ask yourself what pain points they have in their day-to-day lives, what problems they’re wrestling with, what resources you can share–and develop content to help ease those pain points and problems. Don’t write things that your audience doesn’t want and need unless you just have a bunch of free time on your hands and happen to like writing. And please? Don’t write about how great you are ad nauseum. So many corporate blogs are filled with ridiculous humblebrag back pat nonsense about their company’s latest accomplishments, award-winning work and the like—do people really think their customers and prospects are interested in that? Because I’m going to guess that they are not. Not in regular doses, anyway.

Research Keywords

Once you have a handle on your audience, a sense of your overall strategy when it comes to blogging and are ready to get started, a good first step is to develop a strategy and figure out what keywords you need to use and want to target in your content.

At their most basic level, keywords are the words people type into a search engine to find information they want and need. And figuring out the right keywords that bring the right kind of traffic to your website, that’s all part of understanding your customer base and what compels them to buy. Make sure you don’t target keywords that have a lot of competition–this is where your opportunity lies. You can’t compete against larger, more credible, more trafficked sites and keywords that are uber competitive. Do the homework, know where your sweet spots are and target them.

If this sounds like Greek to you and you want to know more about keywords and keyword research, check out SEOMoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Keyword Research. You’ll learn a lot and thank me later.

Understand the Power of a Headline and Early Content

When I’m speaking about content creation and writing for the web, I often start by saying that data shows that 8 in 10 will see your headline, yet only 2 in 10 readers will click through. Pretty sobering, isn’t it? Yet all too often people don’t understand the power of a great headline and the fact that they have about two seconds to capture a reader’s attention.

And writing optimized headlines–super important. Write headlines that use those keywords you identified in your keyword research above, and use introductory sentences early in your posts that also utilize those keywords. And deliver on the promise of your headline. Make sure you sell your post in the very first paragraph, don’t make your readers work for the content you’re tempting them with. Understand that Google is all about serving up relevant content to searchers’ queries, so make sure your content is well defined and that it delivers what you promise your readers by way of your headline, your META description and your body copy.

Market Your Post

Even if you write great content using the suggestions outlined above, you still have to market it. That’s where the power of social media networks comes in. If you don’t ‘market’ your content using networks you’ve invested time in building and the friendships you’ve cultivated over time, I’m not sure how anyone is going to know about it to read it. It’s not automagical. Readers don’t just appear because you wrote something, although that would certainly be lovely, wouldn’t it?

This is where building your networks before you need them comes into play and it’s also how you get incoming links to your site. And those incoming links are like Internet gold—they are a critical component of how search engines evaluate your website and blog. As my smart friend Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing likes to say, “The links attracted by great distribution of great content creates a very desirable link ‘footprint’ that is rewarded by search engines. To think this will happen naturally in any reasonable period of time is shortsighted.” That’s a nice way of saying it’s not going to happen automagically–you’ve got to work it.

Not sure about that linking business? It sounds complicated, but it’s really pretty simple–so hang in there. People will read a post you write that’s about something they are interested in. They like and trust you as a resource and like the content you produced. In turn, they will write something on that topic and link back to your post, which tells The Google that you (and your site and your post) are credible. The more this happens, the more rapidly your content moves up in search results and the more targeted traffic (and readers) you’ll get. Like I’m doing now, with a post my buddy Ian Cleary of RazorSocial wrote called 5 Ways to Ensure Your Blog Posts Are Not Ranking on Google, which is what got me thinking about this topic in general and like I did above, when I mentioned Lee and linked to his site and to his blog post on a particular topic. Each of those actions showed Google that I like and trust them and their content.

See how easy that is? And it happens all the time. But if you don’t know your audience, do your homework, write using effective titles supported by SEO optimized content and then market that content across the web with a goal toward earning trust and credibility (as well as backlinks), well, you probably won’t have many readers of your blog.

What do you think? Does this make sense or is it a whole lot of nerdy talk?

Image: break.things via Compfight cc

Blogging Best Practices: How to Get More Blog Readers is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

A recent report into the predictability of human behavior from digital records, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proved to be fascinating reading on that very subject. This insightful analysis, based on results from over 58,000 volunteers, concluded that, “a wide variety of people’s personal attributes, ranging from sexual orientation to intelligence, can be automatically and accurately inferred using their Facebook Likes.” Interesting—and just a little frightening, right? (Kind of makes me want to never like another cat video again!)

The study analyzed volunteer-provided Facebook likes, along with detailed demographic profiles and the results of several psychometric tests. The tested traits included age, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religion, political views and intelligence. Some less obvious traits such as “satisfaction with life,” substance abuse and “whether your parents stayed together” were also measured.

Intrigued, aren’t you? Here’s a glance at some of the more interesting insights:

• The highest accuracy was achieved for ethnic origin; African Americans and Caucasian Americans were correctly classified in 95% of cases.
• Gender was correctly assessed in 93% of cases.
• Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and similar results were achieved for Democrats and Republicans (85%).
• Sexual orientation was easier to distinguish among males (88%) than females (75%).
• Smokers (73%), alcohol drinkers (70%) and drug takers (65%) were all identified at surprisingly high rates.
• More intangible personality traits such as emotional stability, openness and conscientiousness scored at a lower rate when compared to personality tests, but were still statistically significant.

I’m not shy about admitting that I’m a data geek (not on Shelly’s level, of course, but I’m getting there)—and even I was surprised at just how much information (and accurate info, at that) could be identified just from Facebook likes. Any web user today is leaving an increasingly large trail of personal information across the Internet—and you can now count Facebook likes among that group of identifying info.

What will be even more interesting to watch is if Facebook ends up monetizing that data. Sure, it could be a goldmine for any marketer who wants to be able to better target prospects through advertising and content. On the other hand, I could see this sort of report sending Facebook privacy fanatics running for the hills—or at least never liking anything on Facebook. Ever.

If you’re as interested in this subject as I am, be sure you take a look at the full report—it’s well worth the read, I promise. And when you’re done, head back over here and let me know your thoughts. Do you see an upside in determining personal information just from Facebook likes? Or do you think this could be a potentially negative use of Facebook data?

Image: Victor De la Rocha via Compfight cc

What Facebook Likes Say About You is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency