Today I tried an interesting experiment. I googled “social media expert”. I wanted to see who would take Google’s #1 spot.

It wasn’t Chris Brogan, whom I would have guessed. Today’s top dog is Giovanni Gallucci. I had never heard of Giovanni, and unless you’re from Texas, it’s probable that you never have heard of him either. Giovanni lives in Dallas and over the last couple years he has made an impressive effort to position himself as a social media maven. I can’t knock that. It’s what anyone who wants to create an independent career in social media should be doing. If you look at his efforts, there is much to learn. Giovanni shows what it takes to gain traction as a social media professional.

To the established social media pros, the A-list, Giovanni Gallucci appears to represent everything that they warn people against. Self-proclaimed rock stars, experts, and ninjas do not present the perfect picture of credibility. There are plenty of articles about what to look for in your social media expert and what to watch out for, and it seems that they all caution us about guys who look very much like Gallucci. He calls himself an expert and a ninja. He alludes to press coverage but doesn’t show examples. He lists clients but doesn’t offer specifics on what he did for them. These points that do not stand up to suspicious scrutiny, and I recommend changing those aspects of his website, but I would not write the man off because his approach is more aggressive. His formula is working. He is the #1 social media expert in Google’s eyes.

How did Giovanni Gallucci steal the top spot from the likes of social media A-listers like Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, and Peter Shankman? He did it with focused SEO. Giovanni decided to optimize for “social media expert”, so that is the title given to his website. Within the content, you’ll find social media mentioned numerous times, along with words like “ninja”, “buzz” and “marketing”. The man understands on-site SEO and he has used it masterfully. He also has massive offsite SEO through profiles on more than twenty social networks, content on sites like SlideShare, YouTube, and Flickr, and an active presence on Twitter and other sites. He presents a focused and consistent picture of himself, and knows what he wants people to remember about him. This is personal branding at its finest. Gallucci seems like a smart, hard working, likable guy and I expect that he will continue to work his way toward a position on the social media A-list.

Where is the lesson in this experiment? First, no matter how strong your presence is online and offline, the top spot in any search engine can still be won by someone who is fully committed to that task. Chris Brogan used to occupy Google’s number one position. Chris still has the single most recognizable name in social media marketing, but it looks like Giovanni is in the race and hungry for victory.

Second, there is no such thing as an overnight success. It takes time and effort to not only learn the trade, but to market your skills and create a reputation. Giovanni can work five times harder than everyone else, and it will still take time to grow reputation and wide recognition. But it may take less time to achieve a high level of success because there are examples to follow and an industry that is hot for expertise.

And the last lesson I take from this experiment is that even though the experts say “don’t call yourself an expert, rock star, or ninja”, perhaps doing those things is precisely what you should do because a) they’re not doing it, and b) they’re talking about it. They promote awareness of the terms and refuse to apply the same terms to themselves, creating an opportunity for somebody else. Kudos to Giovanni Gallucci for recognizing the power of calling himself a Social Media Expert.

I noticed that “social media ninja” is still up for grabs. We’ll talk later. I have some work to do.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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It’s an idea so simple that you’ll wonder why it isn’t already used by everyone from your mom to your best friend. Go to a website, create a contact list, record a voice message, send it to all of your contacts in the list. You pay by the minute and the number of calls, but the service is not at all costly. Sending a one minute message to ten people costs less than a dollar. Sending a message to 150 people costs less than $10. Longer messages cost a little more, but not much.

ShoutNow is an Indianapolis-based start-up that is currently in beta, but will be launching soon. They are even developing an iPhone application which I find especially intriguing, because the service requires set-up through a web browser. This brings the portability and simplicity of Twitter to a voice application. For all of those people who use their phones to talk to people rather than as a way to send and receive messages, you now have a way to reach them.

It doesn’t take long to realize that you could use this service in so many interesting ways. Your wife is having a baby and you want to get the word out to everyone, but you really don’t want to make 50 phone calls, nor do you want to slight one relative or friend over another. Your contact list could be set up in advance, and you could take just a few minutes to blast your voice message out to everyone at once.

ShoutNow is scaled for individuals, but it can also be used for business applications as long as you follow the rules. That means you have an existing relationship with customers, have permission to call, or you are a not-for-profit institution. From a marketing perspective, ShoutNow provides a great way to cut through the clutter of email and get on someone’s radar. The negative side of this service is that some people will use it to pitch products, when in essence, ShoutNow is a relationship-building tool. Proceed with caution and use ShoutNow to start conversations, and you will make a wise investment. Use ShoutNow to generate spam, and you may find yourself blocked from calling a valued customer.

The Twilio web sevice api makes it relatively easy to integrate web apps with telephone services, enabling applications like ShoutNow to rapidly come to market. I will be keeping an eye out for ShoutNow and similar applications that bring Web 2.0 principles to the telephone, but I can use your help. Do you know about other applications like ShoutNow? I’d like to hear about them!

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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Anyone who builds a new website today quickly realizes that it’s nearly impossible to get noticed without making some substantial efforts. You can market your website using traditional marketing promotions, but these only work while the program is running. Using the web to grow your long tail visibility will increase your exposure long after the campaign has ended. Long tail marketing requires time and effort, but the lasting benefits provide great value to your web presence.

Web Directories
Web directories provide reference and contact information about your business. It is likely that your business is already listed in many popular web directories but those listings are incomplete. This is due to the way directories are initially created from public domain sources. Your job is to find the web directories where you are listed and enhance the listing with additional descriptive information, including a URL to your business website. You might not have a top-ranked site, but the web directory entry for your site might bring your customers one click closer to you.

Social Bookmarking Sites
While web directories are created from information that has been collected elsewhere, social bookmarking sites aggregate the personal web directories of many individuals. The idea behind social bookmarking is that I might share interests with you, and you might have sites bookmarked that I would like, so if you share your bookmarks, I can see which sites you think are important. Social bookmarking gives people an additional way to find your site.

Leveraging Content Aggregators
Sites like YouTube, Flickr, and DeviantArt are content aggregators because they offer unlimited space for anybody to upload and share their content. Often, people will upload to a content aggregator and then share a link to the content on their site, creating an outbound link. But within the sites themselves, you can create a user profile that includes a description of your business and a link to your website. Content aggregators will help you connect with different audiences and can increase awareness of your business.

Creating Original Content for High Authority Sites
The most valuable inbound links come from high traffic sites with a reputation for having high quality and authoritative content. If you establish yourself as an authority in your field by creating high quality content that is popular or informative with internet users, you can increase your visibility by offering to develop content for high profile sites to be published with a byline briefly describing your business and including your website address.

Encouraging RSS Subscriptions
When another website publishes an RSS feed of your website, each article of the feed will have an inbound link to your site. Every published RSS feed will evangelize your brand and increase your visibility. Optimize your blog format for RSS and you will more likely encourage others to publish your feed.

Blog and Forum Participation
This is perhaps the best way to increase visibility. There are literally millions of blogs and forums that you can participate with. Spend a few hours or days researching these resources to find the most active and relevant places for your participation. Develop a reputation on the sites as someone who is helpful and authoritative, and nobody will mind an occasional plug for your website. Just don’t overdo it. Community members recognize when someone is just there to push their products and they will be left with a negative impression rather than the positive one that you should cultivate.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it should give you a good start on your web marketing program. As the web continues to evolve, some of these approaches may lose favor, and others may appear that are not yet popular. What are you doing to build your long tail web presence?

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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When I focus on search engine marketing, I generally concern myself with 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN, because I like to start by following the 80/20 rule and give my attention on the top 80% of the search traffic. Acording to J.P. Morgan research, Google is the most popular search engine with 59% of all search traffic. Yahoo comes in second at 20%, and MSN is in third place at 7.7%. These numbers are important because they tell where people go to search, but they’re also important for a formula I created to rank search engine competition on a given term. This formula can be described as follows:

RP is the search results position
PV is the position value
EP is the engine popularity
RV is the rank value
CR is the competition rating

PV = 100/RP
RV= PV * EP
CR = SUM(RV)

If this appears confusing, it may be that you’re like me, and worked on other things during algebra class, but I can explain the formula by showing how it works with an example.

Berkley-Fishing.com is #3 on MSN, #5 on Yahoo, and #5 on Google. By taking the percentage of market share for each search engine and multiplying it by .01, we get the EP values for each search engine. The EP values are .077 for MSN, .2 for Yahoo, and .59 for Google. The PV (position value) is determined by dividing 100 by the results position. This produces a fractional number that is suitably weighted to reflect the significance of the highest positions in RP. For Berkley-Fishing.com, the PV is 33.33 on MSN, 20 on Yahoo, and 20 on Google. Rank value is the position value adjusted by the engine popularity, or share of audience that the search engine has. To determine Berkley-Fishing.com’s RV for Google, we take the position value which is 20 and multiply it by Google’s Engine Popularity, which is .59. The result is 11.8, meaning the RV for Berkley-Fishing.com on Google is 11.8. We repeat this formula for each of the other search engines, substituting the new RP and EP numbers, and sum the results to get the overall Competition Rating, or CR. The CR result for Berkley-Fishing.com is 18.37.

You are welcome to do this exercise on your own, but I have already done the work for you. Here are the individual search engine results and their calculated values for the term “fishing line”.

MSN Bing Search Engine Results

Yahoo Search Engine Results

Google Search Engine Results

Fishing Line Manufacturers Rated by Search Engine Position and Relative Competition Score

From a search engine marketing perspective, we now have a clear picture of who the competition is. If your brand is nearer to the bottom of this list, you no doubt want to know why these various competitors rank so high? For that answer, we have to dig much deeper, looking at each site to understand how search engine factors have determined their ranking. We can do this because search engines try to think like people, albeit algorithmically, and so they try to analyze what the web designer intended and what the person searching wants to find. We just need to know what to look for, and how to think more like a search engine. We’ll save this next step for another post.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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It’s easy to optimize brands for their name. Type Berkley Fishing into any search engine and you’ll see www.berkley-fishing.com at the top of your search results. Optimizing for a product category can be much more challenging, as you have to compete not only with other sites that mention your product, but sites who talk about the category in general as well as every other brand with a similar product.

To compete for product category positioning, you need to identify the most popular search terms people are using to search for products like yours. We’ll use the example of fishing line. There are many manufacturers of fishing line, and the fishing enthusiast community is massive. Someone wanting to optimize for “fishing line” will be competing with informational websites, enthusiast websites, retail chains and other brands. You have a slim chance for gaining the #1 position, but you can be first among competing manufacturers. This is helpful because sometimes people want to find out where they can get the best deal on fishing line, and sometimes they’re more interested in learning about different kinds of fishing line. This is where your brand can compete. If you provide great informational content and can effectively communicate your product’s advantages, you will create a strong and positive brand impression. You may not be #1 for the search term, but you can still be #1 for the people who are seeking brand information.

Fishing line is an obvious choice product category for fishing line manufacturers who want to rank high for their product category. But what about other possible terms? What about “best fishing line” or “bass fishing line”? Should these terms also be considered? And if yes, should they be given equal or more effort than “fishing line”? It’s worth finding out.

Evaluating search term popularity is an essential early step in your optimization effort. Simply put, you might think you know what people are searching for, but that may not always be the case. Using a keyword analysis tool, I determined that “bass fishing line” is more popular than “trout fishing line”, but “best fishing line” is more popular than both by a 2:1 margin. That is good information, but even more important is to recognize that our original term, “fishing line” is 40 times more popular than “best fishing line”. In this case, we want to focus on “fishing line” as our key term.

With our keyword properly identified, we now want to discover whom we’re competing against. Typically, you want to look at the top 20 positions in each of the major search engines, though if you are not ranked in the top 20, you may want to look further. Every gain that you make will directly influence the traffic your website generates from search results. The following results show how much traffic can be gained by advancing into the top 10 of Google’s rankings, and the impact of gaining even one position higher in the top 10.

Google’s Search Rankings

That’s a lot of information to digest for one post. Next, we’ll look at who the competitors are, and try to determine how they have earned a strong position in the search engines.

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

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As I continue reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, I find well-constructed ideas that everyone involved in advertising should consider and several are especially suited to those engaged in social media. Here I have taken his 11 points on what makes a campaign great, and added my own abbreviated explanation of what Ogilvy means.

What you say is more important than how you say it. Ogilvy says large promise is the soul of advertising. The promise you make should not be left to chance. Testing and refinement with a qualified audience are essential to determining the most successful promise.

Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop. The trick is in having clients who recognize which ideas are the great ones, or rightly trust that you are capable of recognizing the great ideas for them.

Give the facts. The more information you give about your product, the more you depend on the consumer’s intelligence to decide for themselves whether your product is something they want. Armed with information, consumers are willing to spend more in order to get more benefit.

You cannot bore people into buying. We are all inundated with advertising throughout the day. If you want your advertising to be heard, it must be done with a unique voice. Create ads that people look forward to experiencing.

Be well-mannered, but don’t clown. People tend to respond best to trustworthy, respectful spokespersons.

Make your advertising contemporary. Use the lexicon of your audience and speak to their experience, A 25 year old and a 65 year old may share similar views, but they arrived at those views in vastly different ways.

Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot write them. As the number of people involved in creating an idea increases, the ability to express the idea with a personal voice diminishes. The most effective advertising is spoken in the voice of one individual.

If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling. A person buys a major appliance perhaps every 10 years, but appliances are sold every day because the audience is always changing. Stopping a successful advertisement simply because the advertisers are tired of seeing it is a poor reason.

Never write an advertisement that you wouldn’t want your own family to read. Be honest. Don’t lie to the consumer. You cannot sustain a brand through dishonest advertising.

The Image and the Brand. Every advertisement contributes to the brand image. A brand cannot be all things to all people. The image must be defined. A defined brand image is to the advertiser what a blueprint is to the architect. Changing a brand image, once acquired, is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.

Don’t be a copycat. Every great advertising campaign is copied by someone. Those who copy are inferior to those who create original, successful campaigns.

Do you agree with David Ogilvy? What would you add or change? How would you apply these rules to your social media campaign?

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Google never ceases to amaze me, but what is more amazing is how Google’s most powerful tools are often just the other side of inconspicuous-looking doorways. How many searchers do you suppose ever click on the “show options” tab on their search results? The number might be many, but compared to the entire Google audience, I’m willing to wager that it is a fraction of 1%. When people search, their eyes go immediately to the results, or back up to the top of the page where they can narrow their search to images, news, retail products, or more.

But if you are interested in how search engines work and how to create a website that is attractive to search engine spiders, Google’s new Wonder Wheel provides an interesting and dynamic view of the semantic relationships between websites and various related search terms.

The Wonder Wheel is a dynamically generated mind map where you can see two nodes and their connecting lines at any one time, plus a breadcrumb trail that shows you the path back to where you started. Mind maps are wonderful things because they organize information by relationships rather than hierarchies. By doing so, they may show results that are important to you, but might not have occurred to you as a search criteria.

Play with the Wonder Wheel for a little while and you start to see how the entire web is semantically connected. With a semantic map of the entire web, you could trace multiple paths from any one topic to any other. The Wonder Wheel isn’t complete, though. Some terms are simply dead-ends. “Urban Dwellers”, for instance, will not generate a wonder wheel. Nor will “Urban Streets”.

I was surprised by the prevalence of three and four word keyword phrases. The semantic engine seems to favor these far more than two word keyword phrases. We will continue evaluating Google’s Wonder Wheel at Keller Crescent Advertising to see what secrets it may reveal, but for now, why not try Google’s Wonder Wheel for yourself? Plug in the name “Kevin Bacon” and see how many steps it takes to reach Steve Jobs. I made it in 34 steps.

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You may think that good writing is good content when it comes to websites, especially if it engages the reader. While that may be true, there’s nothing better than good writing that people come across easily because it’s composed in a way that search engines love. The best way to improve your chances of being discovered by readers is to write the kind of copy that search engines eat like candy. If this sounds intriguing to you, then read on.

You need to start with keywords. A keyword is a term that people search for, and that is relevant to your client’s product or service. You want to identify the keyword that you are most likely to get results with, which usually means it has a high search/competition ratio. The more often a term is searched and the lower the competition, the better your results will be. You can research keywords with Google’s keyword tool.

When you compose a topic, make sure you use the keyword in your title. This is very important. You also want to think about synonyms for your keyword. In the case of this article, the keyword I am optimizing for is the phrase search engines. As I write, I want to mention this term, as well as words like searches and phrases like search engine results. Ultimately, my goal is to populate the copy with at least a few occurrences of the term, but not over-saturate my copy with it. I should mention that there are other words in this article that are also being optimized, including copy, article, and keyword. There is some argument about the appropriate word density, but in my experience, an average of around 6-7% is more likely to earn higher search engine rankings.

Once your copy is written, there are a few more steps that you want your webmaster to follow through with. A picture might be included in your post, and in the HTML code, you will want to provide text that will act as a substitution for the picture, if the picture can’t be loaded. In code-speak, this is called ALT text. The ALT text should include your keyword or key phrase. Also, your webmaster should provide links from your article to other articles on the website, and those articles should contain at least one instance of the keyword. Your webmaster should format the title using an H1 tag, and make one occurrence of your keyword bold, using the bold tag. It is important that these steps are done, but not overdone. Otherwise, the search engine algorithms will not take your copy seriously. The idea is to make your copy appear to be relevant and important, using the few semantic devices available to the search engine robots.

There’s one more step to this Ninja tactic. You want to create inbound links to your copy once it’s published on the website. If you know people who are highly interested in the subject of your article and write blogs or articles, ask them if they’d be interested in mentioning your copy and linking to it. This creates an inbound link from another person’s website. Even if you don’t know someone, you can still create inbound links yourself. There are more than 100 million blogs out there, and surely there are a few active blogs that your article is relevant to. If that blog allows comments, you can write a comment that references your story, and create a link to it. In time, the search engine spiders will find this link, and recognize that it connects to your article, sweetening your popularity.

There is no guarantee that your article will become #1 in Google’s rankings, or anyone else’s, but you will improve your results by following these steps as they are outlined here. It may seem unfair or even corrupt to write copy that influences the search engines, but is that any less fair than writing copy that influences readers? I don’t think so.

For another perspective on blogging, please consider this article.

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While contemplating how to pitch a long-standing client for new web services, I came to the realization that we need to convince them to kill off their current website. It’s a beautiful site, filled with many subtle touches. But it’s a Flash site, and as such, it has many limitations. You can add content, but not without changing the design and nowhere near as easily as if we just designed a new CMS-enabled site for them.

Because the Flash site wasn’t created to hold an ever-deepening well of content, it takes about 15 minutes at the most to exhaust anyone’s curiosity and you’re left with this toy that just sits there like an animatronic toy with limited behavior set. This site does not serve their brand nearly as well as they may think it does.

And since it’s a Flash site, we won’t be able to plug in our behavioral analytics tools to show them how users are interacting with the site. We will have a difficult time building a case based on hard numbers. Instead, we’ll approach the problem from another angle, the website as social media hub.

As a brand, it’s important that they reach their customers but they don’t get to pick the channel any longer. The day of the website as your channel to your customers is dead. Brands need a social media hub that allows them to update content for customer reach in one place, and broadcast that message to the customers where and how they want to be reached.

To explain what I mean, let me offer an example. You can reach my wife through email or Facebook, and maybe her Yahoo News page. My sister is only going to see text-based email. You can find me through several channels, but I’d prefer to have anything a brand has to say come through an RSS feed so that I can decide when I have time for it. I don’t want more email cluttering my inbox, and I probably won’t visit your website on my daily rounds. If a brand want to interact with me, they better give me choices.

It’s possible to build a social media hub in Flash but when I crunch the numbers on the development hours involved, it simply doesn’t make sense. Every new thing we come up with will both cost more and take us further from the simple and elegant design of a well-executed Flash site and more toward the web 2.o open source toolkit. It makes sense to just scrap the Flash site and start building fresh with the toolkit.

Now if only I can convince the client… I welcome your suggestions on how I can be the most convincing.

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The article is about two websites, flickr.com and radar.net. Both are picture sharing services with a difference. The point of the story is that Radar released an iPhone application that also supports flickr and the relationship between these seeming competitors is symbiotic because they are as different in intent as  Twitter is to Facebook.

Along comes Philip Kaplan.  Phil posts the comment “I prefer Mobog for sharing cameraphone pics. It appears to have a bigger and more engaged community than Radar, so more people will see and comment on.”

Then he posts a link to mobog.com followed by the disclaimer “I founded Mobog and this comment is spam (tho everything in it is true) ”

Thirty minutes later, he comments on his own post: “Now I feel bad for leaving this comment. It’s kin of mean. Sigh. I would delete it if I could.”

Philip Kaplan followed my advice to the letter. He shared a comment on a big media story about competitors products, expressing how his preferred product differs. He didn’t hide behind an alias. He disclosed his vested interest. He even preempted criticism with a quick apology. Yet the way he went about it still stinks. And he’ll probably get away with it.

Philip Kaplan is not only a shill for his  start-up, he’s also the founder of AdBrite, F–kedCompany, and several other web-oriented businesses, he’s been featured in Forbes and Rolling Stone. He’s the sort of dot.com entrepreneur that many people wish for themselves to become. Kaplan also has a reputation for openly using black-hat techniques for raising his own rankings in search engines. Kaplan knew what he was doing was wrong, and every word–including the apology–was engineered to get more notice for his 2008 start-up.

So where did I go wrong in my previous advice? I don’t think I did, and I still stand by it. But it was incomplete. I didn’t account for people like Philip Kaplan who will openly game the system because he knows that it will irk people, but not land him in jail. Phil doesn’t care about brand reputation. He knows that most internet brands are disposable. A brand has no value until it gains mass, so if mobog.com never sprouts, Kaplan will just toss it away and move onto his next big idea.

For those readers who are brand custodians, a real brand that has value, I would like to suggest  a social media version of the Hippocratic Oath. “Above all, show respect”. Respect the author, respect the conversation, and respect the audience. If you do that, it will be difficult to make enemies in the social media community. You can still share brand insights and points of differentiation. Just do it with respect.

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