WordSmith › Social Search is King, Part II
“Pithy PRognostications from a recovering journalist …”
Words of the Day
“The red-breast whistles from a garden; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” — John Keats, English poet
Content, Content, Content Brings Focus To Social Media
Content is king when it comes to social media. The following three practices from Social Media Examiner will help you focus your online marketing efforts to maximize your relevance for social search.
1. Create fresh and original content
Google’s internal name for the recent changes to their search parameters is the Panda Update. If you Google that phrase, you’ll find numerous rants regarding how particular sites lost up to 90 percent of their traffic following these recent changes. The reason for this is Google downgraded not only specific content, but also domains where there was an abundance of it.
So, if you happen to be a blogger who has been creating high-quality, original content for your community, Google just gave you a big thumbs-up. While there are a number of places to create your online content, a blog that you control is arguably the best place.
Thus, your primary objective is to strive for originality. If you’re going to republish the words of others, do so only to the extent required for supporting your original perspective. And of course, always ask for permission and provide attribution. Here are some guidelines for creating original content:
• Provide your unique perspective
If your perspective is truly unique, it adds something original to news that’s available elsewhere. This is why fans tune in to Howard Stern or David Letterman, and why your community will do the same for you.
• Curate only the best content
Do your research and learn from other experts first, then personalize only that content that’s highly relevant to your community.
• Learn from your community
Regularly engage with your community to learn and discover the unsolved problems. The solutions to unresolved problems by definition have to be original.
• Provide your unique perspective
If your perspective is truly unique, it adds something original to news that’s available elsewhere. This is why fans tune in to Howard Stern or David Letterman, and why your community will do the same for you.
2. Share to build social context
To better understand how sharing builds context that enhances your online presence for social search, it’s helpful to understand social graphs. This earlier article gives you a full description, but for now it’s enough to know your social graph is a digital map that describes you from the context of your relationships with your connections or friends—and from the content that you all share, which includes links to articles, photos, videos and more.
A powerful step you can take to help Google find all of your social content is to establish or update your Google Profile. The recently updated Google Profile interface has been simplified, making it easy to aggregate all of your social networks, as well as other online news sources relevant to you or your social network.
3. Use location and time to enhance relevance
In response to the many comments regarding the changes to their search formula, Google simply affirmed that their objective with search is the same as it has always been: to return the most relevant information as quickly as possible.
While we live in an increasingly global business environment, what’s most relevant is what’s happening in our own environment—or the one we happen to be visiting. Fortunately, optimizing your location is now practically unavoidable thanks to the prevalence of geotagging.
You may think that location isn’t relevant for your business if you don’t have a location that your customers regularly visit. However, consider that if you’re a technology expert who has any kind of association with Palo Alto, your influence is instantly enhanced.
Thus, there’s more to location than just proximity. Location is just one example of context. Another is time. In their effort to provide relevant content for search terms, Google and other search engines make an assumption—right or wrong—that real-time news is more relevant than what happened yesterday.
This means you have to make an effort to use real-time networks such as Twitter to keep your content fresh for Google and your community.
Golden Mic
Each week, WordSmith will bestow a Golden Mic Award to the person, group or company in the court of public opinion that best exemplifies the tenets of solid PR, marketing and advertising – and those who don’t. Stay tuned … and step-up to the mic!
The WordSmith News Bureau is based at Deane, Smith & Partners, a full-service PR, marketing and advertising agency. Got PR? Need marketing strategy? Ad consulting? Message Wordsmithing? Creative & online initiatives? Reach the WordSmith at wordsmith@deanesmithmedia.com.