Truth be told:  online marketers are very good at online marketing!  Their social media marketing strategies can even serve as models for other B2Bs.  So, in our quest for B2B social media genius, we looked at examples of firms pushing the medium to its max.

We wanted to know what online marketing agencies (and others in the search and marketing industry) were giving away on Twitter, so we examined industry Twitter streams to see what giveaway promotions they’ve recently offered to their followers. The giveaway items range from software trials, to free eBooks, to iPads, to a trip to Facebook’s headquarters.  Here’s the full list:

• Acquisio gave away free eBooks
  12 Free eBooks on #PPC #SocialMedia & #Display. Get your hand on them at the @acquisio Resource Center http://ow.ly/4AdDr
  
• Adgooroo (Eric Ward) gave away autographed copies of his books at the Search Marketing Expo.
  I will be giving away autographed copies of my #ppc book at SMX East today around 3-3:30! Swing by the @AdGooroo booth
  
• Adlucent gave away a free iPad at SES New York
  At #SESNY today? Visit Adlucent in Booth 2301 for a chance to win a new Apple iPad2!
  
• AMEX Open Search Manager gave away $20,000 and a trip to Facebook’s headquarters.
  Did you know @Facebook & @OPENForum are giving #smallbiz an #OPENBigBreak with $20K and a trip to Facebook HQ? Enter now! http://aexp.co/Knc
  
• Bing announced an MSN trivia game on news & trending topics with a $100 giveaway.
  Are you a wiz w/ breaking news & trending topics? Play the @MSN trivia game 4 a chance 2 win $100! http://binged.it/lqEGcq
  
• Blekko gave away iPads at South by Southwest
  Congrats to @peplau for winning the #blekko #sxsw iPad 2 giveaway! Thanks to all who participated. It was great meeting all of you.
  
• Covario gave away inexpensive tumblers at a Forrester Marketing Forum.
  Stop by the @Covario Booth #400 at #FMF11 to learn about all the digital marketing programs Covario has to offer + get an orange tumbler.
  
• E Search vision utilized a tweet as a conference discount for the eTail West e-commerce show.
  Visit us at eTail West 2010! Call 415.814.1001 & mention this tweet for a conference pass discount when you register as a friend of eSV
  
• Experian offered a 10% bonus on a purchase of its address data verification service.
  Verify the quality of your address data with Experian QAS for @Salesforce app! Receive a 10% bonus by purchasing before 5/31! bit.ly/gXsHvZ
  
• Full Sail University gave away free movie tickets to the feature film “Thor” during a reception.
  FREE THOR TICKETS!!! First 25 people to Building 3 (FS3B/EB Auditorium) reception get tickets for tonight at 7:30pm! Limit 1 per person.
  
• Kenshoo gave away 1 free book, entitled “Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google” per hour at the SES Expo
  Gearing up for SES Conference & Expo in NY next week. Giving away one of these bad boys every hour at booth 2223…. http://fb.me/vyHXD5aW
  
• Marin Software gave away an Xbox video game system at ad:tech
  Congrats to Dan x2 from Tightrope Int, one of our Xbox winners at ad:tech! http://plixi.com/p/92731610
  
• Sedo promoted a limited-time discount code for domain name transfers.
  Ready 4 #SedoMLS & ur registrar isn’t? Xfer names 2 @Dynadot 4 cheap 4 a limited time! Use code DynaMLS @ checkout: http://bit.ly/lEjval
  
• SiteWit announced a programming contest for recent college graduates. The prize? A job!
  We are looking for a team of co-ops from USF. Participate in our programming contest. The winning team will be… http://fb.me/M6asn85E
  
• Submit Edge offered 15% off an order at SMX Melbourne
  Stop by our booth at #SMX Melbourne for a 15% off coupon for your next order
  
• The Search Monitor promoted an insider discount code for the Search Insider Summit.
  Getting ready for Search Insider Summit next week in Captiva! See me for a discount code.
  
• Web Position offered a free trial to WebPosition, a tool that checks one’s search ranking.
  Check your #ranking with our Free Trial: 1 URL, 5 #keywords, 2 engines, and zero registration. http://bit.ly/dgn3j5 #SEO

Have any examples to add? Or any favorites from the list?  Feel free to comment and let us know!

The world is ending this weekend, in case you haven’t heard. Presumably some of us will be still hanging around waiting for some sort of apocalyptic event while others will be plucked away to, I don’t know, eat Hot Pockets and play Angry Birds with the Almighty.

We’d hate for something like the end of the world to inconvenience your social marketing efforts, so here are a few things you can do to make this transition a little easier on your organization.

If you’re planning to be whisked away, good for you! We’ll certainly miss you, especially if you are considerate enough to make things a little easier for your customers in the following ways:

Schedule your farewell messages. There are many tools out there for scheduling tweets. We use free and cheap services like Postling, Sprout Social, and Tweetdeck for this purpose. If you’ve got a lot to say and you feel like splurging (hey, what’s a little money when all forms of commerce are useless anyway?) you can pay for a Pro account on a tool such as SocialOomph that allows you to bulk upload scheduled tweets.

Open up your LinkedIn group. Nothing is more annoying than being blocked out of a sweet LinkedIn discussion because the group administrator has been raptured. Do us left-behinds a favor and take advantage of LinkedIn’s newer group feature: set your group to “open” so anyone can join.

Give the looters a place to check in. Transition your happy customers to end-of-the-world looters* in tech-savvy style. Make sure to claim your Foursquare venue or Facebook Place for your business, so that your check-ins will show up on your official account.

* Important Note: Gravity Search Marketing does not endorse looting, even when the end of the world is nigh.

If, like me, you’re not going anywhere, and you may find yourself a little bored with your newly-deserted Twitter experience. So you’ll want to find some new friends to chat with. Try Listorious to find interesting and influential Twitter users that other people have listed. For the kind of company I’ll be keeping after the end of the world, I’m thinking my best bet would be to find experts in booze or irreverant humor. But you can also find listed social media experts, too.

In case the end of the world isn’t happening this weekend after all, I hope you’ll find these social media tips helpful, anyway.

We often hear local small business owners lamenting their presence on Yelp – and the strongarm tactics that some describe hearing from Yelp salespeople.  A recent ad in our local San Francisco newspaper proclaims: “Yelp is Evil.”  The ad was taken out by Brass & Glass, which currently has a 2.5 star average on Yelp.

Stomaching negative online reviews has got to be one of the most difficult aspects of small business ownership these days.  Readers, do you have any advice for companies like Brass & Glass?

Q:  What does the @ sign do in Twitter?

A: Starting a tweet with @name is known as a reply.  It will cause that tweet to be seen only in the newsfeed of the recipient as well as anyone who is following both you and the recipient. Starting a tweet with any other character (except “DM @name,” which initiates a direct message) will cause it to show up in the newsfeeds of anyone who is following you.

As an example:

My Twitter handle is @jengrappone.  @gradiva is following me, and you’re following us both, but @JensFriend is only following me.

If I tweet:

@gradiva thanks for the great idea!

The following people will see the tweet in their feed:

• Gradiva (because she is the recipient)
• you (because you follow both the sender and the recipient)

If I tweet:

Hey @gradiva shared a great idea today!

The following people will see the tweet in their feed:

• Gradiva (because she follows the sender)
• you (because you follow the sender)
• JensFriend (because she follows the sender)

Because these are public tweets, not direct messages (DMs), they can also be seen by anyone who happens to look at my profile on Twitter (www.twitter.com/jengrappone).

Sometimes people in a debate, or participating in a conversation that they want others to notice, will add a random character in front of the username, for example:

.@gradiva you stole that idea and everyone needs to know!

.@jengrappone hecks yeah I did, and I’d do it again!

This will cause each tweet to display to the followers of each sender.

Readers, do you know any other tips or tricks for Twitter replies? Share them in the comments!

Q. What’s the difference between Like and Share on Facebook, and which one should I add on my site?

A: Facebook like and share are similar, but have some distinct differences.  Here’s an overview of how they each work:

	When Facebook user Jacob chooses to like a web page, it will immediately appear as one line of text on his profile page, along with a small “thumbs up” icon. It’s fairly discreet. For example: “Jacob likes Cinnabon.”
	When Facebook user Janina chooses to share a web page, it will appear to her friends in her status feed with a personalized caption of her choice and optional thumbnail image. For example: “I just played the Cinnopoly game at Cinnabon and I won a free drink! You should play it today.”

Share posts a link to the user’s status feed (along with a thumbnail and description) and allows users to personalize the post with a caption.  Like is less likely to display to friends, although it can display in the status feed under some conditions.

SHARE PROS

• Higher visibility to user’s friends in the Facebook status stream
• Allows user to add a personalized caption & select a thumbnail image
• Added to user’s wall & news feed

SHARE CONS

• Takes longer, requires more steps
• Page owner doesn’t get a record of the Share occurring
• Can be used to make negative statements about a page
• Not quantified, no reporting of how many people shared this page

LIKE PROS

• It’s very quick. It only takes one click of a mouse.
• Likes are quantified to show popularity on your company’s Facebook page.
• Like is inherently positive. There is no “dislike” button
• Facebook users can see if their friends like your page; this information is displayed directly on your site
• Like will often lead to an immediate share. After clicking like, your website visitors can be prompted to immediately share something personal about your business with their friends, if they so choose. This requires that you use the XFBML embed format.
• If you are a Facebook advertisers, likes will display along with your ads
• Using OG tags, Like will allow you to take advantage of the additional capability to publish to the visitor’s stream (more on this in a future post)

LIKE CONS

• Lower visibility
• No personalized captions or thumbnail images

Which to choose?  You could include both like and share, just like Danny Sullivan.  But if we had to choose only one, we would select like with an XFBML embed.  Why not enjoy the best of both worlds? It will allow your company to benefit from all the advantages of like and allow your customers to optionally share when they want to do so.

Developer instructions for adding the like button can be found here.

Q: I’ve been hearing that I should add social media meta tags to my website.  What are these and what do they do?

A: Like everything else in the social marketing space, social media meta tags are evolving rapidly.

We recommend using the Open Graph format for social media meta tags.

Basic Tags

The basic meta tags are title, description, and image:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”The title of my page” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”A description of my page” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.example.com/thumbnail-location” />

Use these tags to specify the title, description and thumbnail image that appear when your page is shared in Facebook, as seen here:

Why use the tags?

If the OG tags aren’t present, then the share items will typically default to the page title (<title> tag), meta description, and images found on the page.  Will the defaults look OK most of the time?  Sure, but you may want to add a little more  pep to your social media descriptions.  For example, “I just watched this awesome video on ZappySite. Check it out!” could be a good social media description but wouldn’t make sense as a meta description.  The tags are also a great way to control which thumbnail image is selected for your page – and there is no need for the thumbnail to actually be displayed on the page.

Video tags and Facebook whitelisting

For pages containing Flash videos, you can use additional special video tags.  These tags look like the following:

<meta property=”og:video” content=”video url (.swf only)”/>
<meta name=”video_height” content=”300″/>
<meta name=”video_width” content=”400″/>
<meta name=”video_type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />
<meta name=”medium” content=”video” />

To properly utilize video tags, your domain must be whitelisted with Facebook so that the video can play within the news stream in Facebook (request whitelisting here).   The combination of whitelisting and video tags will result in all shares of that page placing a video thumbnail (including play button) within the user’s news stream.

Video tags effectively override the standard “share” experience: people will no longer click on the link directly to your site.   Instead, they will stay within Facebook and play the video there.   This probably makes sense if your video serves as an advertisement for your company, or if going viral is your main goal.  If you would prefer for people to watch videos on your own site, this approach is not for you.

Video tags are also recognized by Google, and we have seen use of Open Graph video tags resulting in video thumbnails within Google’s listings.

Here, we’ve described the use of meta tags to control how your page looks when it is shared in Facebook.  In a future post, we’ll address other powerful features of social media tags.   Have a pressing social media question?  Ask us in the comments!

Here’s an easy, free way to monitor your business reputation online.

If you have a business, surely you want to know what people are saying about it online.  But staying abreast of all of the forum posts, customer reviews, or blog discussions that mention your business can be overwhelming.  We recommend consolidating all of this info onto an iGoogle page.  Why iGoogle?  Simply because this is already the homepage for so many people.

Here are step by step instructions for adding a feed to your iGoogle page:

1: Create a Google Account

Instructions can be found here.

2: Choose a feed page

Different businesses will need to monitor different venues.  A restaurant should probably be watching reviews on Yelp or Chowhound, while a hotel will monitor Tripadvisor and a software firm may watch conversations in relevant forums.  Let’s suppose your business is  Fuel City Tacos, in Dallas TX.  A search for your business name on Google shows reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Chowhound, as seen here:

Let’s choose Yelp for today’s tutorial.

2: Sign up for the Feed

With your company’s reviews page open in the browser, Look for the RSS feed icon next to the address bar where the page URL is displayed.  In Firefox, the icon looks like this:

Click on the feed icon and open the feed URL in a new window.  Select “Subscribe to this feed using Google”

Finally, select, “Add to Google Homepage”

3: Enjoy Your Feed on your iGoogle Homepage

Here’s how the Fuel City Yelp feed looks:

Keeping an eye on your reviews is a big first step in the important ongoing task of monitoring and managing your business’s online word of mouth presence.   We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful!

If a podcast falls in the forest.. and no one hears it.. was it ever really there at all? Don’t let this be you! Submit your podcast to the following sites and be heard:

• iTunes - instructions for submittal
• Podanza submittal page (no adult/mature content)
• Podcast.net submittal page
• iPodder.org – submittal page
• Podcast Alley submittal page
• Podcast Pickle – requires registration first - registration page.
• Podcastdirectory submittal page (from Penguin Radio)
• Podcastingnews – instructions for submittal can be found here.
• Odeo – registration required
• Singingfish submittal page
• Blog Universe – a $1.99 fee to submit - submittal page
• Yahoo Podcast (see feed submittal on right-hand side of page)
• Syndic8.com – requires registration first - registration page
• Podcast Bunker - submittal page
• Digitalpodcast.com – requires registration first - registration page
• Podcast411 submittal page
• Podfeed.net submittal page
• Podcast Shuffle submittal page
• idiotvox.com submittal page
• Allpodcasts.com submittal page
• Amigofish submittal page
• BlogExplosion – registration required first - registration page
• Blog Resource submittal page
• Castregister.com – registration required first - registration page
• FreshPodcasts.com - submittal page
• The Pod Lounge - submittal page
• Podcast Central - not currently accepting submissions
• Syndic8 – registration required - registration page

Spanish-language Podcasts:

• Apodo
• Elpodio
• Podcast.com.ar
• PodCastellano
• PodCast in Guatemala
• Podsonoro
• Spanish-language Podcast Directory

Specialty Podcast Directories:

• Learn out Load – podcasts you can learn from (educational, etc.)
• Podcastvideos.org - submittal page
• Video Podcast Directory - submittal page
• Family friendly podcasts
• Queer Podcast at qpodder.org
• Audiofeeds.org (music only) submittal page
• Women in Podcasting list – submit via email editor@contentious.com
• SportPodcasts.com - the name says it all.
• Podutainment – educational podcasts
• More educational podcasts
• Outdoor radio network – for podcasts related to fishing, hunting, etc.
• Spoken word only at Podscope.com - submittal page
• The Godcast Network – another name that speaks for itself
• Independent/Underground Talk and Comedy: New Time Radio

Search engine marketers love Digg. But Digg hasn’t been giving them a whole lot of love back. Here is some insider advice for dipping your toe into the Digg pool.

Website marketers far and near are striving for hits on Digg.  Why is Digg so alluring? For one thing, it gets huge numbers of visitors: over 15 million unique visitors a month. A well-dugg article could bring a pointy spike in visits to your site.  For another, it’s free! There’s no fee to get the over-the-top traffic you crave. Instead, you earn the best positions with a more elusive form of currency: compelling content.

We sat down with Scott Baker, Digg.com’s Director of Operations, with a few simple questions on every website marketer’s mind: how can we use Digg to help our clients?  What does Digg really want to see? And what is the formula for success on Digg?

“Don’t Try to Game the System”

Brace yourself for disappointment: Baker says he can’t share any insider secrets that will get you more diggs, because, as he says, “It’s all in the hands of the users.”   Yup, just like so many other marketing endeavors, there are no formulas or magic bullets.

Baker was, however, happy to share some basic Do and Don’t advice for Digg newcomers:

• Categorize correctly. For example, if you are posting a blatant opinion piece, make sure to post it in the “political opinion” category instead of “political news.”
• Be unique! Don’t post a story that already exists on the site – search for duplicates before you submit. And, if your story is not covering a unique subject, you’d better have a unique angle.
• Don’t post a link to your own blog and make it look like a news story. For example, posting a story with the newsy title “Rumsfeld Resigns” should point to an actual news story, not a second-hand retelling on your own blog.
• Don’t try to game the system. Digg has multiple safeguards against spam and bombastic marketing content, including algorithms that influence and moderate the rise and fall of stories. But probably the most important safeguards are the diggers themselves. For example, according to Baker, there’s a simple reason that attempts to buy diggs didn’t work: “When unscrupulous content owners tried to pay top diggers for diggs, it didn’t work because the stories themselves were not of high quality.  That’s the built-in B.S. detector of Digg.com.”

Learn From a Master

Hungry for more strategic advice?  You might look to Neal Patel, co-founder and CTO of ACS, and well-known veteran of the Digg homepage. Patel is a great source of Do’s and Don’ts for Digg newbies (our favorite: add humor to your title and description, even when posting a serious story).  He also details a strategy of participating in the community, making friends, and giving more than you expect to receive, in this podcast.

As Digg has risen in popularity, it serves as an excellent example of common challenges in SEO in general. Appealing to a particular user base, providing unique and interesting content, writing well, keeping abreast of changing algorithms and standards of acceptability. These are not new concepts – they’re very, very old school SEO.

Controversy Built In

One thing we learned from Neal Patel’s advice is not to be taken in by the “post it and they will come” mystique. It’s not that simple. Digg’s audience is a community of primarily young male techies. You need to appeal to this audience, but just as important, you need to not offend them. Hell hath no fury like a PO’d digger with a bury button and a commenting feature at his disposal. If you don’t believe us, you can read Danny Sullivan’s account of his own Digg misadventures.

No doubt about it, things get exciting when a website is composed entirely of user-generated content, and directly influenced by its users’ preferences. Sure, there are individual users voting on stories “in a vacuum.”  But primarily, Digg is a community, and it behaves like a community – with affinities, grudges, schisms, and moderators trying to keep things from getting out of control. Networks of friends can coordinate to give each other boosts by digging each other, or to bury common enemies. And then there’s just plain anarchy for the fun of it. Have you heard about the time that hundreds of Digg users mutinied and posted forbidden code?  Or have you seen the popular article “exposing” a group of sites that violate Digg’s user guidelines? Or the world’s most hated comment? This is just the tip of the iceberg on the daily feuds, accusations, and drama that is interweaved with the website’s main menu of seriously entertaining content.

The takeaway? Learn the ropes and avoid breaking etiquette by becoming a user first; spend a good month as a regular user before you even try to post an article.

So, Why Try?

We won’t lie – we haven’t had big success with Digg, but we then again, we never expected any. After our conversation with Scott Baker, we’ve come to a not-so-startling conclusion: The majority of the Digg user base does not like SEOs. We’re not taking it personally, but we are taking it with a practical attitude: we won’t place a lot of our social media marketing efforts into Digg.

You, on the other hand, may have lots of good reasons to try for your 15 minutes of fame on the Digg home page. Here are some indicators that Digg might be the right venue for you:

• You have unique content that has a serious chance of appealing to an audience of young opinionated techies.
• You are an excellent writer who is especially talented at crafting wry headlines.
• You already have a loyal following that is likely to Digg your content.
• You have spent a good amount of time actually using Digg.

If you have Digg-specific appeal and a very strong understanding of Digg etiquette, then get to work on your Digg strategy – you just might make it to the home page!

Q: I have a question about links. I have been researching other SEO sites and a few discuss a process of authoring and submitting articles to hundreds of article submission sites. Because each article has a link back to my site I would be creating hundreds of links to my site with each article I publish.

Is Article authoring a strategy you have an opinion on? Pros and Cons? I keep reading about the pros but no cons so far.

A: We love the idea of writing articles as part of your link building process. There are several approaches you could take:

1. The approach you mention, writing articles and submitting them to copyright-free distribution services
2. Creating a blog and posting your articles there
3. Writing articles and posting them on your own website
4. Writing articles and submitting to online or offline publications

Different strategies will work better for different people. Our own strategy has been #3, writing articles and posting them on our own website. We primarily promote these through social networking like digg and del.icio.us and naturally developed inbound links. You might want to look at our article about “Head Trauma: The Movie” for some ideas about social media marketing. We think that #2, posting articles to blogs, is also a very valuable option. If you work on becoming active in the blogosphere, having a lot of good articles on your blog will ultimately build your inbound links and credibility. Of course, you have to be willing/able to commit to regular posts. Option #4 has the advantage that you can target the audience.

The cons of option #1 – submitting your articles to free distribution websites such as Articlesbase or a zillion others – are that your content will be posted on websites that you can’t control, and some may not be of your choosing. This could detract from your credibility. You may not want your “sweat and blood” poured into an article to create Adsense revenue for others. And these articles don’t work for you in building your own blog content, reputation, and “trustrank.” Another obvious con is the time and effort involved in the writing and submittals. But yes, option #1 can be a good strategy if you are comfortable writing articles. Just be sure that you follow the advice inour SEO bookwhen we discuss this subject: make sure your content is going to be cited properly and will include a link back to your site.