Posts Tagged ‘seo’

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Facebook Delivers Sharing on Steroids

3 Feb
2012

by Greg Clayman

This is the third in a series of 10 posts about the future of the media industry contained in a report titled: Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web.

Q:  How does the rise of Facebook change the relationship between media and its audience?

Publishers need to embrace the social Web. They have to be where their audiences are and do what they can to make their content easy to share, and to digest across any given platform. Facebook allows media to engage with audiences in new ways, and the amount of commentary, feedback and interaction with audiences is greater than ever. Facebook also allows for a greater degree of discovery. By dramatically simplifying the ability to share anything, Facebook has hyper-charged distribution for all media products: free, paid, subscription, ad-supported; they’ve made distribution friction-free. It’s one thing to tell a friend about something you like. That’s been happening from the beginning of time. It’s quite another to “like” an article, a song, a video, etc. and be able to instantly broadcast to everybody you know.

 

Q: We’ve gone from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to SMO (Social Media Optimization), so how will search change as the Web becomes more social?

Before the social Web, online search was entirely about looking for pages. And relevance was defined by how many influential sites were linking to a given page. This is the Google world: the link economy. Social adds an important layer to this – “What is it that the people I know and trust like?” “Where do they go?” “Who do they trust?” “What’s in their worldview?” This examination of one’s own orbit is part of what makes social media so fascinating from a search perspective, it’s a whole new dimension to explore. And one that’s clearly not lost on Google as evidenced by their recent launch of Google+.

We’re in the age of the curator. The more “infinite” the Web becomes the more difficult it is to find the media that is relevant to me. I think curators are going to be ever more important in the coming years –Mike Allen’s POLITICO Playbook and Jason Hirschhorn’s Media ReDEFined are two great examples who come to mind.

 

Q:  How do you build a brand in publishing when, with greater frequency, media is distributed through social channels?

For one thing, you have to allow many-sided conversations on today’s emerging and evolving social Web. That means ceding some control in order to engage with consumers and give them the experience that they want. Sharing is the cornerstone of brand building on the social Web today.

It’s also important to have a strong editorial voice. Content aggregators, for example, might give you a tool to find just what you’re looking for.  But that specificity can lack the serendipity of stumbling on something new by following a strong editor or curator. That serendipity is important and is how we learn to trust some voices over others.

 

Q: What are the critical success factors in publishing as we look to 2020; and who will be the winners?

You have to be nimble with distribution and go where the audiences are. You also have to work very hard to engender trust and build recognition and reputation. You want people to know you and feel good about your brand so that you can move quickly to take advantage of any and all new technologies as they develop and scale. This represents future growth.

 

Greg Clayman is Publisher of The Daily. Launched by News Corporation in early 2011, The Daily is a tablet-native national news brand built from the ground up to publish original content exclusively for the iPad. Prior to joining The Daily, Clayman was executive vice president of Digital Distribution & Business Development for MTV Networks (MTVN). Before MTVN, Clayman co-founded Upoc, one of the first mobile content companies in the United States.

To download the complete report, please click here:  “Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web”

How Facebook Is Crushing Search

2 Feb
2012

by Jeff Berman

This is the second in a series of 10 posts about the future of the media industry contained in a report titled: Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web.

Q:  How does the rise of Facebook change the relationship between media and its audience?

Radically. The conversation has historically been pretty much one way – media to audience or audience to audience. And it hasn’t been at scale. In the new world, however, the conversation is scaled and omni-directional. Since Gutenberg, or at least since Marconi, media has had a massive megaphone. But the audience hasn’t had real power. Thomas Paine and his patriotic pamphlets may be the exception; Paine had a voice and a platform, but it wasn’t a scalable model and it lacked speed. Today, everyone is a publisher, and there can be millions of Thomas Paines, reaching tens of millions of people instantaneously. Everyone who wants to create compelling content, or a movement, now has the tools. This is a very different world from even seven years ago.

 

Q: What’s changed fundamentally about media with the rise of the social Web, and what do publishers need to do to adapt?

First, if you’re involved in a one-way discussion, you’re not taking advantage of the social Web opportunity, and you’re leaving a ton on the table. Another advantage if you’re a legacy media property – let’s say The Wire or The Godfather – is that you now have a chance to stay in the conversation and continue it, so you’re alive and you remain active in the culture. You can keep the property and the franchise in front of new and existing audiences, thanks to the new digital tools. If the show is taken off the air, for instance, it can still be all over Facebook. Audiences are empowered today, and folks want to participate in the conversation. No one may be able to control the conversation, but people do want to shape it – and they can. The social Web gives them choices, and it provides options and alternatives for publishers and media players, too.

 

Q: We’ve gone from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to SMO (Social Media Optimization), so how will search change as the Web becomes more social?

Here are some powerful numbers from a recent Forrester report. In 2004, 83 percent of Internet users deployed search engines to find content. That was before the rise of Facebook. By 2010, it was 61 percent. So, we saw a drop of a quarter in a six-year time frame, the same time frame in which social media took off. This isn’t a coincidence; it is, however, a causal relationship – and it makes sense, given what we know.

On a more sweeping level, we’ve historically learned about shows to watch and diapers to buy because we’ve spoken to friends and family. Now we’re taking these word-of-mouth conversations to the digital networks. And we’re not just using Google to search for the answers; we’re going to our friends’ Facebook pages (and, increasingly, to Twitter, particularly for real-time multi-platform engagement). This is trusted referral at scale, and it’s fast and reliable. That’s why Facebook represents such a monumental shift.

But let’s not forget that Facebook is just seven years old; You Tube is six years old; Groupon is three years old; the iPad is 18 months old – so anyone who proclaims a clear vision of the digital world even five years into the future is either a prophet or a fool. Broadly speaking, you will see evolution in SMO, and a continued deep integration of social functionality. The key point here is that Facebook is a part of today’s Internet operating system, so the efficiency and reliability of social sharing and peer reviews is going to increase big-time. In other words, the 83 percent, which fell to 61 percent, will fall even further as the social Web grows.

Finally, I’m especially interested in what Apple does with TV, and what will happen when Web TV is connected at scale and social functionality is built into the experience. The ability to share in real-time straight from whatever screen you happen to be viewing will meaningfully change the way we choose what content we engage with and how we engage with it.

 

Q:  How do you build a brand in publishing when, with greater frequency, media is distributed through social channels?

There’s an apparent conflict out there right now. The brand world has never been more crowded than it is today. And yet it’s never been easier to build a massive new brand. The reason? As the universe gets more crowded, brand-building tools are being disintermediated. Spotify is a good example. All of a sudden, it’s skyrocketing, in no small part, because its offering is social. The same is true for LivingSocial and Groupon. These businesses have exploded like we’ve never seen before largely because of social functionality. People find it easy to share their experiences about the products, and they like having others show them the way to the marketplace. This is authentic social content.

 

Q: What are the critical success factors in publishing as we look to 2020; and who will be the winners?

The old axiom that you have to fish where the fish are holds true so it starts with platform ubiquity. We’ve seen this already with the explosive growth of mobile, and it’s just going to intensify as a necessary success factor over the next decade. For the vast majority of publishers, you will have to empower your audience to experience your content where, when, and how they want.

For startups, this is in their DNA. But the recent history of media suggests such change is not easy for mature publishers. You simply may have to cannibalize profitable (but declining or soon-to-be-declining) businesses to build for the future. That, or risk watching a newcomer come along and eat your lunch.

 

Jeff Berman is the General Manager of Digital Media for the NFL. He previously held a series of positions at MySpace, ultimately serving as President of Sales & Marketing. Prior to entering the digital media space, Berman was Chief Counsel to United States Senator Charles E. Schumer and a public defender representing children charged in the District of Columbia’s adult criminal courts. He also held an adjunct professorship at the Georgetown University Law Center.

To download the complete report, please click here:  “Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web”

Google Search Plus Your World: An Offer You Can’t Refuse

27 Jan
2012

by Ben Elowitz

This article was published as a guest post at XConomy, and is republished here for Digital Quarters readers.

I’ve been taking in Google’s recent release of “Search, plus your world” (or SPYW as the cool kids say) over the last several days, reflecting on what it means for Wetpaint and other media companies; but perhaps even more importantly, deeply understanding what it indicates about Facebook and Google themselves. As we all know by now, these most recent changes are meant to make its search more personal by up-weighting social activity in its algorithm, and using each person’s own position within their circles to determine relevance.

You might think that I would be one of the first to jump in the game with Google. After all, my company Wetpaint has been making a massive investment in distributing our content via other social channels, particularly Facebook. We’ve been seeing massive returns. And, I’ve even gone on a limb to predict that Facebook should be implementing its own Web-wide search this year.

Still, when it comes to playing Google’s social games, so far I’ve advocated staying on the sidelines of all their social venues—even their recent business pages. That’s been because even though the stadium lights are on, no one is on the field. More specifically, even though Google has 90 million registered users of the service, we see very little activity of significance among our target audience. But with its new SPYW changes, the question is: Has Google indeed forced companies’ hands?

Unfortunately, they have. And, in doing so, it marks a milestone in the changing mentality of Google. The search company’s great innovation—using the signals of the Web to best determine what the audience really wanted—has now been subverted. The company’s originally unshakable-seeming ethos of mechanistic neutrality has slowly, slowly, slowly, and now all of a sudden given way, and the new precedent is to favor its own business interests over those of the audience.

The result, like it or not, is that companies that rely on search for traffic must hear and obey loud and clear Google’s message that Google will favor those that favor it. It’s a dirty truth, and one far more chilling than the other more technical biases of its algorithm before.

Google has already started infusing search with the content that’s been blessed via Google+. Do a search for “New York Times” and you’ll probably find the New York Times plus.google.com page as the second search result. Search for “Mark Zuc” and you’ll likely see Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (despite the irony) populate as an option in the Google Instant choices.

I haven’t seen this bleed over to news stories yet, but I believe that it’s coming. Soon you’ll do a search for the latest headlines and your search results will be chock full with musings from your friends and non-friends inside Google+.

Google+ may not take off as a real social network, but Google has indicated that it’s throwing its full weight behind it anyway to make the best of what it’s got. Even if consumers don’t adopt it en masse, whatever activity is present will pepper the famous algorithm’s search results.

The irony here is that Google’s pivot toward a social search belies how important that social data is. The company is putting its lock on search at risk to gain a chance at a foothold on social. But what really comes through to me is that a great social search can be a winning product—if it’s populated with the right social data. So far, Google’s is not.

The question is—if that’s what I’m after—won’t I still just go to Facebook, where all my friends actually are (and which Google has adamantly cut out of SPYW)?

While SPYW does force publishers to support Google’s social network, fortunately it will be a temporary sacrifice from publishers during this period of transition from these days of search to a socially wired world. And that forthcoming world looks increasingly like it will be wired not by Google, but by its arch-enemy Facebook. Indeed, by corrupting the quality of their search product, Google may have just opened up a clear product entry into search for their rival as well.

What We Learned This Year About Creating Successful Media Properties Online

19 Dec
2011

by Ben Elowitz

This week, we made some announcements about our achievements at Wetpaint, and it has prompted me to take a look back at 2011.  It’s easy to be proud of the 6.4 million unique visitor audience we have built at Wetpaint Entertainment monthly.  It is a significant accomplishment in just 15 months since we launched, and the Wetpaint team has worked passionately to get us here. But even a number like that is, well, just a number. The real value of what we did in 2011 lies in the all the learning we had about how to build, run and monetize a successful media property online.

And that learning makes me feel grateful – because as successful as we have been this year, it’s been against a context of upheaval in the industry.  Media is not easy.  Old formulas from print and broadcast are no longer working.  And even the just-minted generation of seemingly successful digital companies, from Demand Media to Zynga to Facebook itself, are having to constantly innovate to stay on top of the wave that they’re on as they hope to catch the next.

Clearly, the most important keys to financial success in media are building audience and monetizing that audience – and we’ve made significant progress on both here at Wetpaint.  Our greatest strength has been the data engine we’ve built to acquire, assimilate, and apply every possible insight about our audience.  We learned that smart and targeted analysis can improve everything we do; that lots of rapid experimentation is critical; and that social traffic is far more valuable than search.

We also learned more about the Kardashians and the people on the The Bachelor/Bachelorette than anyone in this world should.  Our editors did a bang-up job capturing the liveliness of the entertainment industry and they definitely deserve plenty of credit.

But while all our great content and social mojo would succeed in delighting audiences, it wouldn’t be enough to make a strong business without excellent monetization.  And so I’m equally excited to note that as we get ready for 2012, we’ve found that our formula of great content and social mojo is just as valuable to advertisers as it is to our audiences.  I’m pleased that we will be working with the team at Cambio Group via their joint venture between AOL, Jonas Group and MGX Lab.  Together, we will be  serving outstanding advertisers with some of the most innovative offerings around.

With this partnership in place, we are able to turn amazing traffic into amazing financial results. It will mean strength for our model and our company into 2012 and beyond.

But the implications are even broader for the industry, and that’s because we are setting a model that others can follow as well.  And that is what I’m most excited about:  What media needs most is a model that can be scaled and repeated – and our latest results make it clear we are on the right track to build it.

Can Social Drive As Much Traffic As Search?

13 Dec
2011

by Ben Elowitz

I’ve projected before that within the next couple of years, social can drive as much traffic as search to major media properties – especially those that are driven by real-time news.  But I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon!

Yesterday was a milestone here at Wetpaint:  social for the day drove over 45% of our audience visits; while search brought in about 30%.

Now consider this:  Layer on the ~150% higher lifetime value of our social audience (our social users stay longer, come back more frequently, and bring additional viral referrals), and social was responsible for over 60% of the value of our audience yesterday.

It may start as an outlier, but it’s going to get more common.  We are on track to be the #1 social publisher within a short time.  Want to know where you stand too?  Stay tuned for the updated media industry social leaderboard, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Why We’re Not Using Google+ To Reach Consumers – So Far

26 Oct
2011

by Ben Elowitz

This article was recently published as a guest post at GeekWire, and is republished here for DigitalQuarters readers.

Since Google+ launched in June of this year, two questions have been on everyone’s mind in the digital community:  1) Can it become a huge success for Google? And 2) Can I use it to make huge success for me?

Much has been written about the first question; but very little about the second.

And so, because we’re obsessive about knowing the social Web, my colleagues and I at Wetpaint have looked long and hard at the second (and unanswered) question.

After a good deal of analysis, I can report that the answer for us as a media company (so far, at least) is “no.”

Here’s what we’ve found:

The lights are on, but no one is home – Google has been quick to point out that 40 million users have “signed up” for Google+. That’s because the product is deeply bolted onto every product inside the Google empire, including Gmail, and they did a nice job of making it easy to invite everyone you know. People checked it out, but they haven’t been back, and I’d bet their active user rates are in the single digits. Every time I log in, there’s almost zero activity among my “circles.” Even with 40 million, that pales in comparison to the reach of Facebook’s worldwide audience of 800 million (200 million in the U.S.), who are far more active (500M per day!).

Users can manage one social network, and no more – Mainstream users have demonstrated that they reach saturation after managing one social network when it comes to their personal life. First, it was Friendster; then MySpace; now Facebook. People don’t have the time and attention span to manage overlapping networks of friends and conversations.

It doesn’t solve a consumer problem – There hasn’t been a migration to Google+ because it doesn’t solve a real consumer problem. Facebook has an entrenched audience with deeply embedded habits. In order for a migration to take place, Google+ needs to do something massively new that addresses a consumer pain point (which it doesn’t – at least not yet), or Facebook needs to make a massive blunder that drives people away (for example, around privacy, which I don’t think most users really care about).  Overcoming this is even harder for Google, largely because it’s viewed by most as a utility, not a place to facilitate stronger online connections / community.

That said, there are a few things I’ll be watching as Google+ moves ahead in the short term:

Influencers – The people who are using Google+ now (the single digits mentioned above) are industry influencers / luminaries / connectors.  They’re using it as a less restricted version of Twitter, because Google+ can share longer, deeper messages than 140 characters will allow. I’ll be curious to see if there’s a migration of these folks from Twitter to Google+. I tend to doubt it, however.

Business pages – Google has encouraged businesses and brands to sit on the sidelines until they release business pages as part of Google+ later this year. These are akin to “fan pages” on Facebook. If these solve a new consumer problem, then they could trigger some migration. But, again, I attach low odds to this possibility.

Search impact – The most convincing argument for embracing Google+ is its potential impact on search. It’s too early to say, but there is speculation that Google will tune its search algorithms to overweight those who “perform” well with Google+. For example, if a brand gets lots of +1’s (Google’s version of the “like” button), then that brand’s share of search volume could be dramatically increased to encourage broader adoption of content providers. This is something I’ll be evaluating after business pages launch, which should take place before the end of the year.

There is no question that the crew at Google is brilliant.  And they will clearly be looking to improve their service for consumers and make it relevant as a premier social operating system for the Web.  But what I will be watching is whether they can solve these core issues to make it a must-have for consumers.  And, if they do, then it will become a must-have for publishers as well.

How Facebook Can Put Google Out of Business

3 Jun
2011

by Ben Elowitz

This article originally appeared as a feature on TechCrunch.

I was surprised to hear former Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly lament lost opportunities and missed chances to catch Facebook the other day.

I used to envy Google and the vast digital empire that Schmidt commanded.  Google had one of the most intricate monopolies of all time. It had the most impressive dataset the world had ever seen; the most sophisticated algorithm to make sense of it; an audience of a billion users expressing their interest; and more than a million advertisers bidding furiously to reach those consumers at just the right moment.

What’s more, it had captured the ultimate prize: increasing returns to scale. Only Google could spread such huge R&D costs among an even more humongous query volume, all while offering advertisers the chance to reach most of the population with one buy. Google had earned its success.

It competed on being smarter.

It was.

And it won.

Google’s business strength was simply taken for granted; so much so that even deep-pocketed competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft stopped trying to outdo Google’s massive scale and core algorithmic know-how.

And that’s why I used to think that Google was unstoppable.

Until I realized one very important thing: despite the fact that Google goes to great lengths to keep its index fresh by indexing pages that often change every hour, or even every few minutes, and despite its efforts at realtime search (including searching the Twitter firehose), its dominant dataset is dead, while the Web is—each day more so than the last—vibrantly and energetically alive.

Indeed, Google’s revered and unparalleled dataset is increasingly dating itself as an ossified relic akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls—outshined by the freshness of the living, breathing organism that is the social Web.

Like dusty and determined archaeologists, Google’s massive bots crawl the Web looking for the artifacts of digital civilization. And what they find is fossils—in the form of pages and links: the leave-behinds of writers, contributors, and casual end-users who have deposited traces of themselves in the skinny crevices and dark recesses of the Internet. Google analyzes these remains, and yet it has almost no first-hand knowledge of any of the users who created this content—or those who are searching for it.

Enter Facebook.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online. The company’s relentless and organic expansion—from an application to an emergent social operating system—has enabled it to know its users, not only on the Facebook.com domain, but also on other sites, as they travel throughout the Internet.

While Google has amassed an incredible database consisting of the fossilized linkages between most Web pages on the planet, Facebook possesses an asset that’s far more valuable—the realtime linkages between real people and the Web.

What does this mean, and what are the implications here?

Well, in a nutshell, Facebook has stored a treasure trove of distinctive data that, if fully utilized, could put Google out of business.

Yes, put Google out of business.

Here’s why.

Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in. And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search when it eventually decides to move in that direction.

If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages, out of all those in the universe, are most likely to appeal to any given (but anonymous) query string, think about this: Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom—specifically and directly.

And, even more powerfully, Facebook knows each of our individual and collective behavior patterns well enough to predict what we’ll like even without us expressing our intent.

Think of it: Facebook can apply science that is analogous to what Amazon uses to massively increase purchase likelihood by suggesting and responding to every minute interactive cue. Whereas Amazon relies on aggregate behavior, Facebook adds in the intimate patterns of each individual—along with their friends and the behavioral peers they’ve never met all around the world. And each of them is logged in and identified as a real person.

When Google was born, its advantage stemmed from its ability to collect and analyze superior data. While other publishers looked myopically at each page on the Web as a standalone realm, Google found that the link relationships between those pages held more valuable relevance data than the pages themselves. All of a sudden, the isolated views of players like AltaVista and Yahoo began to look one-dimensional. And ownership of what is now the $20-billion-plus search advertising market was cemented.

In the last several weeks, Google has indicated how important Facebook-like social networks are to its still-vast ambitions. One proof point is the launch of the new +1 product; another is the company’s internal announcement that bonuses will be tied to success on the social Web.

It may seem that this is about capturing a new market opportunity. But, trust me, it’s not. In reality, it’s Google’s recognition that Facebook has the same kind of advantage over Google that Google is used to having over its competitors.

And Google is smart to be scared.

Very smart.

But, if the truth be told, it will take far more than +1 to measure up to the whole new human dimension of the Internet. After all, the human organism is home territory for Facebook and utterly foreign turf for Google’s algorithmic machine.

Photo credit: flickr/Ken and Nyetta

Don’t Depend On Google’s Algorithm: SEO Slaves, Rise Up – And Revolt!

8 Mar
2011

by Ben Elowitz

Move on from the Algorithm

Early reports are in confirming the results of Google’s index changes.  Yahoo’s Luke Beatty says two-thirds of Associated Content pages have lost traffic, while I’ve heard that total volume declines from Google search have reached 70% on some properties.

For sites like eHow and About.com, which get somewhere between 65%-70% of their traffic from search, the concentrated risk exposure that comes from Google engineers changing the algorithm makes for an unstable and uncontrollable business model.

Never in the history of media has there been such a precarious model for distribution, and the bad decision by SEO-focused sites to try and build a relationship with an algorithm looks worse and worse. The SEO-focused sites kowtow to the algorithm’s desires, as best as they can interpret them.  They game their moves internally, based on what they think the algorithm wants, not what the customer wants. And they rely on the white hats, as well as all of the blackest hats they can stomach, just to please the algorithm.

But, unfortunately, the algorithm is capricious and unreliable.

What these companies should do is form relationships with consumers.

That means providing consumers what they want – and where they want it, which increasingly means in their Facebook or Twitter feed, and on their mobile phone.

In the end, this is the only way to create great experiences that are branded in the consumer’s mind today.

My advice, then, is simple.

SEO slaves, rise up – and revolt!  Throw out the false God of the search algorithm and, in its place, focus on building valuable content and experiences. Win the audience, not the search.

7 Ways To Make Social Media Optimization (SMO) Work In The Post-Google Age

28 Jan
2011

by Ben Elowitz

This post originally appeared as a guest post on iMediaConnection.

Preface:  Recently, I wrote a controversial post about the end of an era:  The days of SEO are dead, and being replaced by a new wave that is far more important and more valuable for publishers:  social media optimization (“SMO”).  I received a number of requests to describe how publishers should create their SMO strategy, and I offer this post to answer that question.

* * *

Social Media Optimization / SMO

The days of search engine optimization (SEO) as a critical audience-driving strategy for digital publishers are numbered. Forward-looking marketers need to educate themselves about a far more meaningful and effective way of bringing audiences to media destinations — social media optimization (SMO.)

Unlike SEO, which uses algorithms to rank top search results, SMO uses the will of the audience to determine what’s important. More significantly, SMO puts a digital face on every member of the audience. Unlike SEO, it differentiates and distinguishes individuals, making sense of their specific content wants and needs. There are no false, fruitless, or futile searches that approximate what people are seeking. Fueled by the passionate participation of real people articulating real interests, it eliminates the fuzzy proxy of an algorithm as middleman. The good news for publishers is that the editorial product is back on top above the technology, as content words replace keywords in importance.

The dramatic shift in web navigation as the social network replaces the search engine as the start page translates into the average web user spending almost three times as much time on Facebook than Google. (For those ages 12-24, it’s more than four times!) Reengineering your approach to distribution for the social web is more critical than ever before. With that said, here are the seven most important elements of an effective SMO program for any premier publisher.

1. Know precisely what the audience wants
The idea of SEO was based on appealing to search engines — if you compel Google’s attention, then Google will bring you more audience. But we are now entering the post-Google age of digital media, and in this social age, the new formula is that if you compel your target’s attention, those individuals will bring you more audience. Whereas, Google played an arrogant and reigning monarch, Facebook is a representative democracy — it listens to the audience and amplifies what it hears.

The first step is winning the attention of the audience and knowing what it wants, not just in the abstract. The key question is, what do they want from you (i.e. what is your brand good for, in their opinion), and when and how do they want it?

Fortunately, this data is abundant. You can find it in your analytics system, in customer research, in your competitors’ wins, and at any time of day on Twitter. The trick is to make use of that data to find insight.

Knowing what the audience wants means asking and observing them and then marrying those observations with creative vision. When we started our company, we asked the audience about the shortcomings of their TV viewing experience, and we found out that there was an opportunity to extend the relationship with their favorite shows by completing it with more gossip, news, photos, recaps, and other content connectors. So that is the content we produce. Then, we track what gets consumed when and by whom. We found that our users watch longer videos disproportionately in the evening, so we gear our programming to deliver those videos after the work-day ends.

Ask the audience often; it gives you need-to-know answers, and gets people immediately engaged in the conversation.

2. Build your fanbase
I can guarantee that the tactics of SMO will change over time, in much the same way that social media will change drastically. But today, Facebook and Twitter are the two significant social media distributors — Facebook is analogous to the retail side of the media economy, serving consumers directly, while Twitter drives media distribution behind the scenes on a wholesale basis. Together, these two make up the vast majority of the media distribution landscape.

An effective SMO strategy doesn’t just sit and hope Facebook and Twitter start coalescing the greatness of your website by telekinesis. Instead, it’s up to savvy publishers to get the party started. Set up a marketing drive to bring your fans to your fan page. Use Facebook’s advertising platform to help make potential fans aware of you. And, above all, build a base of influencers to a size that approaches critical mass, so that you are fully connected within the social network from the beginning, rather than sitting outside just looking in.

3. Create content worth spreading
Once you know what your audience wants, and you have a fanbase to appeal to, now comes the part that premier publishers are good at. But in the post-Google age, designing for pass-along is much more than just designing for consumption. In fact, the practices that help publishers succeed in SEO are deadly in this era of SMO. Stuff a page full of keywords from the “long tail,” match the URL to the “head” keywords, and keep the content readable by Google (careful with Flash and JavaScript technologies that are used to make compelling user experiences!), and you will find a boring website that falls flat on your users and pays negative returns in social distribution.

Instead, the way to put the social wind at your back is to publish content that is worthy of being shared — and to wrap it in experiences that your users can’t wait to share with their friends — with pride — which is the emotional fuel that powers the Like button. With your audience as the judge, it’s all about the quality of what you share with people.

I can’t think of anyone who has surrounded this idea more than the organizers of TED. With an iconic focus throughout its entire organization and community on “ideas worth spreading,” TED has created an influential community of audience and participants by focusing on incredible — world-changing — ideas and experiences. And in the process, it has built an audience of mind-blowing quality and quantity, with a top-1,000 website by the numbers, and even greater elite status if you factor in impact.

4. Package to get attention
OK, so in a social world you’re not competing for Google’s attention. No, far harder, you’re competing for attention in a Facebook feed or Twitter stream like a light bulb in Times Square at night. My homepage view on Facebook is pre-loaded with 33 posts vying for my attention; and Twitter’s endless scroll appeals to the insatiability of my appetite like the bottomless salad part of the Olive Garden experience. We crave infinity as much as it overwhelms us.

As far as Facebook and Twitter are concerned, their value proposition is more, but for publishers it’s a different story — it’s about being best. Standing out in that crowded field puts the focus not just on what you say, but on how it’s said — what are the iconic images and headlines that appear in a Facebook feed, and how do you maximize the 140 merchandising opportunities in a Tweet?

The editors at The Huffington Post have made themselves experts in both the art and science of packaging. They start with the artful side by writing compelling — even at times sensationalistic — headlines designed to grab attention, and that compounds their expert capability with a scientific approach. It’s no wonder that The Huffington Post has seen a tremendous boost from social networks fueling its explosive growth overall.

5. Design for virality
Viral distribution is about much more than the content itself — it’s also about an experience that promotes sharing. Your site, your experience, and your Facebook page all need to be designed for virality. Turn content into interactive features with sharing.

It starts with greasing the gears. Make sharing easy by:

  1. Including the familiar icons and social traction
  2. Placing them in obvious intersections where readers should want to share (middle/end of article vs. homepage)
  3. Pulling in social conversations relevant to your content — what are people saying on your Facebook page and Twitter, and how can they participate in that conversation right from your site?

Doing all three of these things provides a tightly integrated social experience.
The Huffington Post is one of the leaders here as well with its “hot on” feature and prolific integration of social sharing at the right points. But still more needs to be done. How do I know which stories should be hottest for me and my friends? And wouldn’t it be awesome if I could see content that my friends would like but haven’t read yet? Then I’d be the water cooler cool guy, the first person to send it to them, and we’d have a system that cues it all up for me.

6. Engage and reward your audience
This means getting involved in the conversation to incite dialogue, talk alongside your users, and ask them what they want. Closely related to this is making the conversation authentic: Engage your audience like a true fan, not a marketing PR executive.

And here’s the key to rewarding your audience — it’s all about appealing to people’s emotional desire to feel important. Rewards for these folks are intrinsic to the sharing itself. For example, on Twitter, the reward is getting more followers and retweets, helping to build social capital and prestige.

You’ve also got to recognize people with your content when they do something awesome. For example, curate a trend they break on a related theme. Call out the forum/message board they run when they post the content. Engage in the conversation they start. It’s a two-way street. This will amplify their interest in you, and reinforce their desire to build reach for you.

7. Measure relentlessly
The core measurements of SEO are obscured by the fact that Google reveals scant details of quality and page rank, but SMO strategies, on the other hand, are completely measurable. On each and every page, you can measure how many people viewed it and shared it, and how many more people that brings. You can test and vary every element, from the window-frame of tools that promote sharing and sharers, to the content itself. Test rigorously, and learn what works for your property and your audience — and do more of that.

These are just seven of the most important ways that SMO can be effectively deployed. The most important thing right now is recognizing that SEO is fading away, and that we are embarking on the post-Google age of digital media, which will, once again, change all the rules of engagement — almost certainly for the better.

Demand Media + Google = Mutually Assured Destruction

25 Jan
2011

by Ben Elowitz

This article was originally published as a guest post on Business Insider.

In my recent meetings with the leaders of top digital media organizations, executives have been unanimous in their bafflement over the impending Demand Media IPO.

Strategic thinkers know exactly what I mean: Demand Media’s “formula for success” is to select topics that only a statistician would love; produce low-quality content at absurdly low cost; and then drip spider-food pages into domains with a legacy of trust from Google built under prior ownership.

Once that’s done, Demand Media financially engineers its income statement to move what everyone else has called “cost of goods” below the line into depreciation; the intent here is to optically reduce expenses by spreading them over five years.

Reactions among media executives and entrepreneurs range from serious eye-rolling to violent throwing up. It’s instinctual rejection.

But why?

Because Demand Media violates the most basic definition of what “good” media is. Indeed, the formula that has built top media properties – from Disney to Glee to The New York Times – was simple: build a great brand on quality content, and then attract a loyal audience. And the formula worked for both analog and digital media, all the way up until the Age of Google.

But Google’s algorithm (Demand Media’s great ally) broke the formula by making every audience interaction with media separate and independent. Like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, the Google algorithm has no memory of relationships; and for frustrated Adam Sandler publishers trying to build a loyal audience, the algorithm sets up an insurmountable amnesia.

Even worse, with every new Demand Media article, Google’s index gets more polluted, and the customer becomes even more underserved. It’s not an exaggeration, but Demand Media probably pollutes Google’s results more blatantly and thoroughly than the top black-hat spammers of the Web.

Then why doesn’t Google just downweight properties like this from its results?

There’s a good reason, and the catch is extraordinary.

Google’s network revenue, which includes its AdSense program – the advertising product that runs on affiliated publishers’ sites like Demand Media’s – accounted for $2.50 billion (30%) of total revenues in its most recently reported quarter.

So, if Google were to reduce the prominence of sites that use AdSense, its revenues and liquidity in the ad market would take a significant hit. And that would be intolerable.

On its side of the fence, Demand Media needs Google, too.

As Demand Media said in its recent S-1 filing:

“For the year ended December 31, 2009 and the six months ended June 30, 2010, we derived approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, of our total revenue from our advertising arrangements with Google … If any of our advertisers, but in particular Google, decided not to continue advertising on our owned and operated websites and on our network of customer websites, we could experience a rapid decline in our revenue over a relatively short period of time.”

The upshot here is that Demand Media is ruining Google’s search results; but Google, for its part, is actively perpetuating the rewards, encouraging Demand Media to keep its content just above a (very) low bar for high rankings.

I don’t blame Demand Media for being an opportunist and playing Google’s game.

But I certainly wouldn’t want to invest in Demand Media shares. The company is too precariously dependent for its lifeblood; and its spotty content quality has badly undermined its ability to earn brand loyalty. That’s a tough setup for a public company, and it makes for a very high-risk stock.

Google, on the other hand, bears more blame. As its quality of results goes down, so does its users’ quality of experience.

And the real competition isn’t just from Bing.

Earlier this month, a digital media executive told me that her 16-year-old niece prefers to search in

Facebook, since it prioritizes the content real people – i.e. her friends – like. Google’s results, she said, are useless and overwhelming. Facebook gives her the good stuff.

The unthinkable is actually happening to Google. Its algorithmic perfection is unraveling; and it has become the entrenched incumbent that is lagging in consumer experience.

And the challenge from Facebook is definitely coming.

The big question is how long Google can hold on to its revenues at the expense of its consumer experience.

Demand Media’s new shareholders will want to be the first to know. That way, they can get out front and sell.


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