Unfortunately, in this environment of no degrees, no rules, no hierarchy, some also seem to be suffering from a lack of respect.

Yes, you may be a “wunderkind” when it comes to getting eyeballs on social content, or launching the next ubiquitous meme, but the basic rules of business, teamwork and respect for others are still highly relevant.

It is not enough to be able to communicate brilliantly in the online world, it is still vital to be able to command the traditional set of face to face communication skills, in order to achieve positive outcomes for businesses and their customers.

Straddling online communities and offline workplaces means developing a set of skills that are equally relevant in both environments, but need to be finely honed to take into account the different expectations and etiquette in each.

Over time I have evolved a simple mantra for businesses wanting to use social media: Be Human. When it comes to face to face business interactions and building teams, Be Human still applies but I would add, Show Respect.

Respect the time, intelligence and experience of the people you are working with and for. Don’t assume that you are the most important conversation or interaction in their day, or that your schedule is more important than theirs.

Don’t assume they should want to drop everything to deal with your requests or issues.

Be appreciative when they do drop everything for you, and return the favour when you can.

Show humility when you are working as part of a team – blowing your own trumpet will usually just alienate your potential supporters. Let your work speak for itself, and if you are asked to talk about what you have to offer, then do so. Don’t take every 1 second gap in conversation as an invitation to talk about yourself, how great you are or your latest achievement.

Don’t assume that because you are under 25 you know more about the digital environment than your older team members. Sure you may not remember a world pre-internet, but that doesn’t mean you automatically know how to achieve a business ROI from social media, or how to maximise the nature of social for your company’s client base.

For every digital native who believes they have all the answers, there are many who are happy to learn from those around them, so I don’t want to tar all with the same brush … just to ask those who don’t seem to be prepared to listen, to think again and give respect where it’s due.

Inevitably, the first thing I now recommend is that social media management either becomes part of the job description of several existing staff members, across marketing and customer support roles, or that it becomes a full time role for at least one staff member. Keep in mind that we are in New Zealand, where the majority of businesses employ less than 50 staff.

As things continue to move so rapidly, it also makes a lot of sense to partner with a company who make it their business to keep abreast of changes in the existing channels (like Facebook’s latest business page changes or the new apps for Google+ Hangouts), can digest the best information out there, and make the most relevant recommendations.

Specialist advisors can also help analyse the tremendous amounts of data available through the wide range of paid and unpaid social media listening/management tools, and develop focused strategies based on that data.

My advice for businesses who want or need to engage, but are feeling overwhelmed by their social media options, is:

1. Pick your playing field based on resource, target audience and priority. Don’t try and be all things to all people.
2. Be consistent across all channels – ensure your customers/clients will have the same experience no matter where they choose to engage with you.
3. Find out where your customers and potential customers spend their time and ensure you are there too.
4. Make good use of the data available to you to make strategic decisions about how and when to engage.
5. Always keep your overal marketing and business objectives in mind – after all they are the reason why you are doing this in the first place.

That’s all I have for now. If you have any tips to add, please leave them in the comments below.

After listening to a number of speakers talk about the technologies they are either developing, or working with in their businesses, to monitor and mine data … that data being the aggregation of our personal comments and interactions across social channels, as it relates to a company’s brand, products or services … I believe that there is no real replacement for having a team of well trained, perceptive, communicative staff working inside those channels.

Human beings – not software algorithms or analytics.

Employing or redeploying staff to focus on social media – call them ‘online community managers’ , social media specialists or whatever you want, but realising that no technology substitutes for the ability of humans to gauge tone and sentiment towards your brand, and respond appropriately in a timely manner.

Keeping your fingers on the pulse of a number of high traffic/high engagement online communities (like Reddit for example) provides the opportunity for your team to notice, report on and decide the best response to anything that is trending in those communities. Many times there will be no need, or opportunity to respond, other times there may be some action you can take to pick up on something that is trending … with a humorous response to a popular meme, for example, or a video response to something that is rapidly going viral.

Being inside those communities every day means that you will be among the earliest groups of web users to be aware of what is going on … as opposed to those who pick up the same content and respond to it months after it has ceased to be of interest to those at the ‘bleeding edge’.

Software is never going to be able to do this for you, only well trained, well briefed and empowered staff will be able to do it.

Where do you draw the right staff from?

Possibly from a pr or marcomms background, ideally with existing strong online networks and experience of engaging in and moderating online communities.

If you have a brilliant front desk person looking for advancement, they could also make a perfect addition to your social media team – friendly, responsive, enjoy engaging with your customers or clients, able to direct queries to appropriate people in the company … all good attributes. As experienced ‘gatekeepers’ they often also have accutely honed instincts about the tone of a conversation, or what the motivations might be behind a particular person’s engagement with your company.

Creating a structure around daily online engagement is key to making this effective, with a system for quickly escalating anything that needs to be considered from a strategic standpoint.

Being equipped for an agile response will ensure your brand begins to be seen as being savvy, ahead of the game and continually relevant to online consumers.

As an example of how this can be managed, cast your mind back to the original “old spice man” campaign. The video ads were written and shot within a 48 hour period, and once they were released, personalised responses on twitter and YouTube flowed rapidly and with the same level of humour and intelligence as the original scripts.

If you can assemble a creative social media team who can not only monitor and respond to brand mentions, but also run creative campaigns and respond with relevant content, then you are well ahead of the majority of companies who are still afraid of sinking too much time and resource into social.

I would love to hear your stories and how you structure the roles of your social media teams within your business. Please feel free to share in the comments below.

Is that how it’s working for you? Are you on Pinterest yet?

Of course it’s another means of curating and sharing the things that you are interested in, although I have had a few friends ask if there is anyway to simply use it as a private resource without all the social sharing aspect of it. As yet, I haven’t discovered how to do that, so if you have worked it out – or know that it can’t be done, please post in the comments below.

Alongside Pinterest, although it has been around for longer, is paper.li – a platform that automatically creates a daily “paper” based on the content feeds and filters you set up.

Exploring paper.li tonight, I discovered that they recently launched Nomad, which enables you to embed paper.li content into a web page or blog. You can even have your paper.li page showing as a Facebook tab.

All of which is interesting for those who want to gather and share targeted information all in one place, but surely there must also be SEO benefits of these tools?

With Pinterest, everything that is pinned is also a backlink to the site you pinned it from, plus of course if the image is interesting or compelling enough, it will be re-pinned frequently and gain even more traction.

And the best part about it is that the links are Dofollow so they will actually be picked up by Google as a popularity indicator.

If you want to add the Pinterest button to your site, you can find the code here http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

With paper.li it primarily focuses on retweets with links relating to the subject of the newspaper. So potentially, if you ensure you hashtag links you are retweeting, particularly of your own original content, then you may get a little traction in terms of traffic or even twitter followers.

It seems that the best way to stop your paper.li from becoming spammy is to use the manual rather than automatic option.

Again, I would be interested to know if anyone is seeing traffic coming through in their analytics with paper.li as a referring site.

Comment below on your experience and if you have seen any noticeable increase in traffic from either of these sources – I would love to hear what you have to say.

The Reddit world is all powerful, all consuming, inspiring fierce loyalty amongst its members, driving them to higher and higher levels of comment witticisms, each time walking the razor sharp edge of being voted up or down, and the consquences for their karma on the site.

For those members of the Reddit community who actually care about such things, and it appears they are legion, having a post that makes it to the first page of Reddit.com, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of upvotes, is more exciting than a promotion at work, winning free shit, the birth of your firstborn, or pretty much any other offline event.

So for the Reddit community to suggest a blackout, was effectively them agreeing to cut off their internet hookup for 24 hours – a major sacrifice, only lessened perhaps by the fact that they knew they weren’t going to miss out on anything while the site was blacked out.

A note re Reddit sharing …

A word to the wise, for those who are not die hard Redditors but unknowingly click the “share on Reddit” button on the bottom of blog posts, thinking Reddit is just another social platform to spread your content on.

Don’t.

Unless the content you are sharing is an incendiary critique of some kind, a completely new ‘meme’ about to take flight, an image that is spectacularly good or awful for some reason, a skilled parody with great (or really really bad) production values.  Just don’t.

Reddit is not a Digg substitute, just waiting to be gamed by random passers by for the purpose of SEOing links back to spam flavoured content.

Those who are successful Redditors succeed because they invest significant effort in crafting their witty, attention grabbing headlines and do their best to ensure the content they are linking to is original and of some benefit/interest to the wider Reddit community. They also regularly engage in comment threads, voting posts up and down, and consistently bring fresh content of value to the table.

Redditors are not people who happily link and retweet to any content that flashes through their Twitter feed.

Reddit is the place that pretty much every funny image, video, meme or parody your friends share on Facebook or Twitter comes from. Sometimes Redditors will have shared that content months before it gains enough viral traction to make it to your own circle of Facebook friends.

Oh and a link that makes it to the front page of Reddit? Can result in millions of hits, which is not for the fainthearted or those without a lot of bandwidth.

So if you’re up to the challenge, wearing your flame retardant knickers and are highly confident in what you have to share, by all means, take the plunge.

If not, can I suggest that you cease and desist … and all will be right in your world.

signed with caution,

Redditor’s wife

With the recent rapidfire launch of new online assets and functionality by uber-adserving-platform Google (no longer really simply a search engine giant), are we seeing an ‘end of days’ … not for life as we know it, but for old style search and what it means?

Evolution has been integral to the web since day one, and evolution in our ability to find stuff online has been dramatic over the years as well. Just a backwards glimpse towards Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves will remind you of that, in case you had forgotten.

Over the years we have seen various major algorithm shifts from Google – which are really only the sort of thing that SEOs obsess over as we try to guess the new rules of engagement.

But of course every one of those changes has been about two relatively simple things – providing better (read more relevant, more accurate, more timely) results for people searching for information, people, places and entertainment, and delivering outcomes to Google’s revenue stream – the advertisers who keep the whole empire ticking over.

We have seen the addition of personalised search, real time search, localised search, search segmented into different content types – images, video, blogs, news, maps, shopping, places, discussions, recipes … even patents.

And the addition of previews, snippets, review stars and the integration of various social media elements – not just Google + and +1, but also Facebook like integration through the social graph… and on and on.

Having worked in an SEO team, I always find it key to remember that any inconvenience we experience as Google (and other search engines) continue to innovate and evolve is really our problem. Google itself doesn’t exist to serve us, or even our organic traffic focused clients.

They don’t mind if we do some stuff, following their guidelines, to ensure good sites are not buried beneath the trivial, irrevelant and spammy. But otherwise, the SEO industry is actually just a by-product of the fact that search doesn’t always deliver what our clients would like it to.

Winds of change are blowing …

So my question remains – have we almost seen the end of standard search as we know it, and perhaps even of “organic vs paid” traffic as we know it?

My gut tells me yes. And you know? Perhaps that is not at all a bad thing. After all, we are (or should be) in the business of getting the right kind of traffic to our clients’ sites. Traffic that converts.

And organic search results through a traditional search engine are no longer the predominant way to make that happen. For example, optimising for local listings may mean that bam! your client is on the first page of results for their most important localised keyword. And it is driving traffic – web and mobile. Not too complex to get that right, as long as you can manage to write down a PIN when the Googlebot calls.

The silver lining to this possible death of organic traffic, from my perspective is, that this level of shift may well achieve what Google has been trying to deal to for such a long time … namely, deal to the spam meisters who create junk sites purely to generate revenue from Adsense placements.

If they can no longer rank, then surely they will no longer provide PPC revenue for their creators … and no revenue surely removes their reason for existing.

Well actually – I don’t think these unimaginative spammers will quite give up at that point, and we are already seeing the rise of social spam, and massive amounts of comment spam – all attempting to send traffic to their non-original websites – just to garner the occasional advertising click through.

What does all this mean for genuine content creators, and genuine businesses?

I am interested in your feedback as to what you think this evolution is going to lead to. I have thoughts of my own … basically from a business consultancy perspective, I think the key going forward is a world of specific search options.

Every site we go to – be it a “normal” website, an Amazon sized site, a social media platform, Wikipedia or YouTube – they all have their own, custom search engines.

Old style search results become a blunt instrument (of sorts) vs specific types of search and check in type results. YouTube is already the second most searched site after Google itself, while for many information based searches people go directly to Wikipedia.

People wanting recommendations – ideally from people they know and trust, will be turning to their various social networks to ask questions and give their own recommendations.

And far be it for me to predict what Google is evolving into, but my guess is, that effectively it is becoming a kind of search portal, segmenting your results page in a far more sophisticated way, pulling in data from all those different types of search and delivering it in one place. Already that is starting to happen, but I have a feeling that it will continue to head more and more in that direction, to the extent that we will no longer be able to recognise the traditional SERPs, or run keyword ranking reports that have any relevance whatsoever.

So from a business perspective, perhaps the most important thing you can do for yourself or your clients, is to sit down with them and work out what kind of search result your site is most likely to be a good fit for, then work towards optimising your presence for the various types of search that would be most likely to deliver your site as a result.

If you have a product or service that can be best represented by videos – perhaps a How To … or tourist related content, then put energy and resources into your Youtube channel.

If you have a tourism business, you need to optimise for TripAdvisor, Foursquare, Facebook Places and probably YouTube as well.

If you are in local retail, then definitely you need to be optimising for local Google search, places, Foursquare – or the other location/review based networks like Yelp if you have them locally.

If you have a food business, again you need to optimise for local Google results, as well as the food review sites, Facebook Places, Google Places and TripAdvisor as well.

You get the picture?

At the same time, I believe we will see a full on resurgence of display advertising delivering traffic, because in a funny way, straight up ads have a kind of honesty – we know they are ads before we click on them, we know companies are paying every time we click through. And done well, they work.

So you still need to ensure that any ads you are paying for are showing on pages that contain relevant content to your business … then ensure that those ads are delivering visitors to an optimised landing page. Everything from that point on should relate to the potential customer’s experience once they get to your site – so we are talking about user focused design, and conversion optimisation.

And that is a post for another day.

I would love your feedback about where you think traditional search has got to, and where it is going – feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Google have signalled all along they are integrating their assets together – and why wouldn’t they? the incorporation of elements like the +1 button has been around for a while, providing you are logged into a Google account of any kind. And personalised search is pretty much unavoidable – even when you turn off search history, you will still get personalised and localised results.

Social search has become more and more significant, as the Google algorithm has shifted from a huge emphasis on links, to taking more and more heed of social sharing and social media networks to establish relevancy in search results. Over the last two years “freshness” has also become a significant part of the algorithm, as they allow for the fact that people are searching for the most current information on anything highly topical.

As for Twitter jumping up and down with utter ridiculousness – as was pointed out by Google, Twitter pulled out of their agreement to provide real time social search results last year – and now they protest? The example used by Twitter recently, of search results in Google for @WWE is also laughable. If anyone is searching for the Twitter conversations relating to WWE, surely they would be searching on Twitter?? If not, they could find their way there via the Google + results that were shown – if WWE has added their appropriate links to their business page About section.

I have been telling clients over the last few months that it is important for them to have a Google + business profile. A lot of them haven’t understood why, given there are less than 100 million members on Google +.

But I have been confident from the beginning that Google + results would show up quickly in search (which they did), and that ultimately Google will no doubt choose to rank results from its own social network higher than those of other networks – after all, why wouldn’t they?

The other reasons I have encouraged clients to get on this evolving network is because of the ability to use the video Hangouts for all manner of things, from sales launches and training, to communicating with clients or team members around the world and so much more. Plus there is the opportunity to effectively use Circles as a company intranet, especially for companies who don’t have the budget to set up a full on intranet of their own.

So it doesn’t concern me at all the direction Google is headed – it has been written on the subway walls for quite some time. My belief is that we are heading to a place where many of the old forms of search optimisation will become largely irrelevant, along with search rankings, and that drivers of traffic and conversion optimisation will become the key measuring stick.

What do you think?

1. Research takes time, and there isn’t always something tangible to show for it. When we scope something for a client project, it might take five hours just to work out that it can’t actually be done in the way the project was envisaged, or with the existing technology platform. Correction – it can’t be done cost-effectively – as they say in the business, anything can be done if you throw enough time and money at it.

2. That when we ask for feedback, information or content from them, the faster they respond with the information we require, the faster and more cost-effectively their project will get done. Dragging the chain in responding may mean you miss the window of time booked in for you, and when the person working on it comes back to it, they will require a bit of additional time to get into the swing of the work again. Allowing them to continue focusing on the project by responding quickly means everyone will be happier.

3. Understand that not everything has to be absolutely perfect to go live. This is not a print run of 5,000 copies that can’t be changed, this is the internet, which means many things can be updated quickly and easily. (Note: On the other side of this coin is the client is who incredibly vague about everything because they think they have forever to get it right … then when the project is finally nearly ready to go live, they sit down and seriously review it and request major functionality, design or structural changes that effectively are the equivalent of rebuilding the entire site.)

4. That we are not mind-readers. The clearer and more detailed a client’s brief, the more closely the outcome will match their expectations.

5. That saying they want their new site to look like Amazon.com or Zappos.com or Apple.com – but they have a budget of less than $20,000 … means we will never meet their expectations. If you really want your site to look like or have that level of functionality, ask us to give you an estimate of what it might have cost to design, build and populate – then decide what your budget is. We are not just making numbers up when we give you a quote, honestly.

6. That if they trust that we have their best interests at heart, we really will try and do the best job possible, within the realms of time and budget. And if we make additional recommendations or ask for variations on the contract, that’s because we think those things will more closely meet your expectations and objectives – not because we are cold-heartedly trying to extract more cash from you.

What do you think? Do these points ring true with you? If you are a client, does this help you understand what might help your project run more smoothly?

• Are all your social media icons up to date? Do you have all the necessary “follow us on” buttons, and do you also have all the up dated sharing tools on your blog posts. If not, you can add the individual buttons, or if you are running a blog, you may wish to update or find a new social media sharing plugin.
• If you run a hospitality business like a restaurant, cafe, bar or accommodation provider, you may wish to explore the new “save to foursquare” button, which enables people who like the sound of your place to add it to their To Do list on Foursquare. This also great for sites or blogs that regularly publish reviews or articles about locations and different establishments. Once the location has been added to a Foursquare To Do list, that person will get “buzzed” by Foursquare when they are in the neighbourhood, making it easy to keep track of all those places you were meaning to check out.
• Go through your site and ensure any relevant date references are updated and accurate. For example, if your About Us says your company has been in business for 12 years, update to 13 years, to keep it fresh and current.
• Review your whole site as objectively as you can – does it show all your current products and services, for example? And are there any pages that could do with some new images or a bit of a design overhaul?
• Have a look at your Google Analytics to determine the most popular pages and ensure the content on these is absolutely up to date, as well as being a good fit with your current business objectives.
• Do the same for your Social Media accounts – do you need to install a fresh Facebook landing page? Time for a new custom Twitter or YouTube Channel background? Time to customise your company LinkedIn profile perhaps if you haven’t already got that in place?
• Once you have reviewed, refreshed and updated your site and your other online channels, you are ready to face the year confident that your site and your content can be easily shared, helping to maintain and build your business reputation and supporting your marketing objectives.

Go for it!!

So we are a week into the new year, 2012.

And what have you done? Did you make a resolution to lose weight, go to the gym daily, quit smoking, cut back on the alcohol or change some other damaging vice or bad habit?

Do you believe in making – and trying to keep, New Year’s resolutions? Or have you ‘been there, done that’ so many times without results that you just don’t bother any more?

I’m pretty much in the latter camp, but just recently I had a little ‘aha’ moment that I think could really help in achieving the things we would really like to change or improve in our lives in the year ahead.

Inspired by a comment on Goddess Leonie’s Facebook page, from one of her subscribers who was thinking of setting herself another group of mid-year resolutions, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons those great intentions we set for ourselves tend to fail, is because we give ourselves a WHOLE YEAR to achieve them

From personal experience, I am sure we all know that the tighter the deadline, the more likely we are to get stuff done. Hell, if the deadline is urgent enough we can achieve almost anything.

When you give this a little thought, I am sure you know this is true.

As the old adage goes, when you want something done, you give it to a busy person.

When we have an endless amount of time ahead of us to do whatever we want, we spend most of that time doing nothing … until we get very close to when that thing absolutely has to be done, and then we do it.

So how do we apply this insight to establish resolutions we can actually keep for 2012?

1. Write down your list of what you would like to achieve this year in all areas of your life – work, home, social, spiritual, physical
2. Put them into order of importance, with the highest priorities at the top of the list
3. Now think about timeframes – you might want to group your items into things that are a one off, that simply need to be done so you can tick them off (like new experiences you want to try, stuff you want to get done at home or work etc) and things that are a longer term process, like reaching a goal weight, or seeing noticeable change in certain behaviours or habits. we all recognise that those things (unfortunately) don’t happen overnight.
4. How many of the things on your list could you ACTUALLY do straight away? But maybe feel a bit silly doing right now, because after all you have a whole year, so what’s the rush?
5. Now this might sound a bit radical, but if you have some stuff you could actually do right now … how about you step away from the computer, and go do at least one of them, right now?! don’t over think it, just make it happen. Now.

A wee musical interlude while you’re gone …

Ok, so you’re back? How was that? Did you get a buzz from doing something and being able to tick it off your list?

What next?

Well my suggestion is that you grab a calendar, or use one your Microsoft Outlook Calendar, or the Gmail calendar, depending on what you use most often to set reminders for yourself.

1. Go through  the first four weeks, and set yourself four things to cross off your list. they will be a mix of the one offs, plus some steps towards the longer term goals/resolutions.
2. Set reminders to pop up and hassle you, and if you are feeling really brave, set some up in a public forum like Facebook as events and invite people so they will ask you what you are doing and remind you to get it done.
3. Make the last reminder of the month one to sit down, review the year’s resolution list and set yourself weekly tasks for the next four weeks.
4. To really get yourself motivated and moving into change, invite a few supportive friends to do this with you. Set a monthly date to get together over wine or coffee and help each other establish four new tasks for the month.

Two techniques for success I learned years ago from the fabulous Barbara Sher, is that we achieve things when we have a) accountability to a team of cheerleaders who you really know have your back and b) structure to develop the steps involved in making something happen.

So write your list, involve friends, make yourself accountable – then let me know how it goes! I would love to hear what you think of this idea and how it works for you!