Social Traffic
The Social Traffic “Soul Searching” Contest for Teams |
Friends, how much nerve do you think it takes to participate in new initiatives? How much do you think it takes to run organizations? Now, multiply that to a thousand. That’s how much it takes to pioneer new business models that span across the globe and will be used for years to come. Pioneering new models puts you in the league of inventors and thinkers.
When you’re walking on a path, you sometimes forget to notice the bigger picture. You’re so busy enjoying the journey that you forget how far you have come. I believe Social Traffic is at such a turning point.
Friends, please don’t forget where we started. Don’t forget that out of 500 people we screened and filtered and washed and fought down to 20. Twenty remarkable people with sharp business acumen, might I add. After months of posts, discussions, notes, waves, exercises, meetings, videos — 20 people were left standing. Out of 20, perhaps 10 would enjoy the summit of success. These top people know what it takes to lead.
Today, we are at the brink of a huge launch. Things are looking up. Your time, sweat, tears and exertions are finally going to pay off. This is the time to move things up and etch your name on Social Traffic’s history for all times.
We have a Hollywood videographer wanting to make a movie about Social Traffic’s journey. About how it started, and then wave after wave led to where it is now. About how people who have never met in real life can come together and work in this fashion without even getting paid for it. This is the new model that I was referring to. I call it the passion-driven business model. The biggest success of Social Traffic is how we managed to bring together all of these wonderful people, who worked towards a common goal without any monetary compensation for months, with the only motivating factor being passion. A relentless passion to make a difference. If this videographer’s dream to shoot this movie happens, he will be visiting all of the individuals who stuck through Social Traffic (Australia, USA, Philippines, India, UK, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, etc) to interview you all to talk about this model… and to talk about your passions.
Friends, I have met many great people through Social Traffic. Some have been with us ever since the first day - I like to call them the originals: Dino, Anne, Jonathon, Rebbecca, Lisa, Andrew, Axel, Peter, Dave to name a few. They are our pillars. Then we were fortunate enough to get more people to join. There are so many that I can’t take all the names, but I have to point out others like Doug, Karen, Steve and Neil who are like shining stars for Social Traffic right now. All of the names that I have taken are just a few from the many who have helped shape Social Traffic and take it where it is now. Nobody’s efforts are going unnoticed, so if I haven’t taken your name here don’t take it personally. This is just a limitation of words, nothing more.
Just like all of our activities have been about building a circle of trust, now is the time for you take the beacon forward. Build your circles. Build your teams. Show us what you’ve got.
We have earned each others respect. We’ve seen what you’ve been through. So please don’t hesitate when building your teams. Nobody is here to judge anyone. The winners will automatically shine through. Don’t hide behind cover. We know who is planning on leading teams for this contest, we just hope you can come in and add your team’s list now. Don’t shirk it for the last minute, and definitely don’t be afraid. Just choose wisely, and stand tall to honor and defend your decisions.
Friends, don’t forget that Social Traffic has been formed on the codes of honor, respect and support. You have two choices: you can either live your life in constant fear: Somebody will rip you off, somebody will copy your work, somebody will break into your house, somebody will steal your code, somebody will bad-mouth you, you will fail in an attempt to shine publicly etc. Fear and good business can’t go together. OR you can live your life with a positive attitude and consider everything and everyone an opportunity to strive for better. Remember, if it were easy everyone would be doing it… and it wouldn’t be something remarkable to achieve. Challenges that demand you to put something on the line is what makes us better.
This, my friends, is an opportunity for you to excel. This is an opportunity for Social Traffic to become a legend. What the heck, give it a try. In fact, give it a nice good push. And we’ll all get to see the results in the end.
It is time for you to come out of the shadows into the shining light. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet. Add your team there - don’t miss this opportunity.
I’m going to highlight some of the important aspects of the contest in my next post.
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Inside Scoop |
The more regional and specific your words, the less competitive they will be, making it easier to get to the top of search engine rankings and the rankings of bookmarking and article marketing sites. As an example, “Billy Joel’s Beach Front Concert in Miami’s Grand Pavilion Hotel” may rank higher in search results, whereas “Billy Joel Miami” will be difficult to rank for at all but if you did, you would get a lot of traffic. If you planned your keyword strategy six months before the concert was big news, no one will own the phrase “Billy Joel Miami” in Google rankings, allowing you to consolidate it well before any other marketers can. If done right, you could secure all 10 search results on Google for that keyword phrase through having multiple content pages optimized for it, like a couple of blog posts, a video page, some articles, an aggregated page like Friendfeed with a mash up of Billy Joel content, some bookmarked pages and most importantly your event page where you would be selling tickets. All these content pages would be cross linked in a way to lead your prospects into your sales funnel. So when people start to find out about the concert, they will use the search engines and guess whose pages they will click into?
Also, please understand that words are important because they also indicate a person’s level of commercial intent. Someone who searches for “Billy Joel” may not be ready to spend money. (Besides this header keyword will cost a huge amount of time and money to rank for). Someone searching for “Billy Joel Miami” is closer to spending money on a ticket, but not assured. But someone who searches for “Tickets Billy Joel’s Concert Miami’s Grand Pavilion” has their credit card on the keyboard ready to buy a ticket…
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Launching A Nightclub On Facebook |
This post is an event launch marketing campaign published in my new book as one case study. My book is called “Social Traffic” - Event Marketing In a New Media Scape and launches on October 21st. Enjoy!
For world class new media centric “nightclub marketing plans click here“.
This case study is based around the execution of a successful night club launch for a client. We used nothing but social media.
Step 1:
So, the first step is to create a virtual group on Facebook of a cool user group who has great parties every now and then. You don’t have to mention the venues or details of the parties these people attend; in fact you can build a culture within the group where doing so is considered a taboo. Focus on group member’s party experiences & stories after a weekend, build excitement, promote their pictures — and the fun they all have each weekend! You want new viewers of the group to think two things:
1- these people are cool.
2- The parties they go to rock.
Step 2:
You want to keep updating this group page with new activities, party ideas, themes,
photos and all of the things that would attract your targeted audience as much as possible.
Remember its taboo to mention a party venue, date or time. Promote the story pertaining to the event:
1- Get people to start following the group in anticipation.
2- Get them to share it with their friends.
3- Get them to add stories and photos of their own nights out, in the lead up to your
event.
Remember the emphasis is always on non-disclosure of your venue or the date of your
launch, though you would want to indicate a month. You may also want to promote personalities within the group as being the kind of people you want at your event. (Always create that feeling of scarcity wherever possible).
Step 3:
Suggest an “anything goes” policy (within the law), release parcels of information over
weeks not days. Remember you are getting the crowd excited, by telling them the story where they can become the stars (if lucky). The story must reflect the perfect night out for these people.
The key is to engage them into a conversation by having them participate in it. Get them to
answer survey questions online (use http://www.SurveyMonkey.com) about the entertainment or dress regulations, even crowd selection, make the groups feel like they are organizing the biggest night out since the Beatles. The thought leaders, people who can move other people will rise to the top of this group through natural selection…
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“Social Traffic” - Why this book topic: |
“Social Traffic” - Event Marketing in a New Media Scape
Why this topic:
In 1958 Licklider saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution, which many years later resulted in the creation of the web. Till 2000, all we needed was a website to be considered ‘on the web’. The definition and usage of the internet has changed so drastically since then, that it’s imperative to think about it in terms of your “complete” web presence - which includes your profiles, followings, social networks, life streaming, blogs and much more. People, who aren’t part of this new social media landscape, are in essence, not really considered ‘online’ at all.
According to a research, as of today; it’s a fact that approximately 73% of online users read blogs. It’s a fact that 57% internet users are on social networking sites. It’s a fact that Facebook just recently hit their 100 million user landmark within months. It’s a fact that people are tuning in to Youtube more than mainstream TV with approximately 83% internet users having viewed online videos. Almost 40% of all the people on the internet subscribe to RSS feeds. On an average 16,500 tweets (twitter) are sent each hour. Most astoundingly, there is a massive shift in company brands when 36% of internet users claim to think more positively about companies with blogs. Should these stats matter to us as business owners, event managers or marketers? I just want to achieve one goal today - make you understand that being ‘present online’ and building a powerful business network isn’t as difficult as it seems. In fact, the principle ideology for online success in today’s world is much closer to your offline mind set than most exponents of online networking can see.
If I can convince any of you to take the leap, to take what you do naturally offline, online…then everything that I’ve done so far in my career would become worth it.
With its huge potential, Web 2.0 has opened up gateways for businesses. There are more than 400,000 entrepreneurs and developers on the Facebook platform - And this is just a SINGLE social networking site. Imagine if you tap into several, how big and profitable it can be for you. The key is to channel the intelligence and savvy of the collected group and make your space a user-friendly place for people to meet, connect and share. Online event marketing also has a huge potential now, more so than ever before, thanks to Web 2.0 techniques. People are no longer an audience who are “just a witness to the event taking place on stage” but are actually a part of planning and promoting it. Your audiences, customers or markets have the most influence in making your events or launches a huge success. Social media has taken things to the next level and the division between “you” and “them” has blurred and “we” has emerged. This book is about channelizing this force to your advantage.
Welcome to Social Traffic - Event anchored Marketing in the New Media Scape.
Book launches Wednesday November 5th.
I hope you enjoy the book, as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Preserve the IP value of your content. Lock your ebook’s into a secure electronic casing that requires an access keys to unlock. Distribute the access key’s, not your PDF’s.
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Google Friend Connect – A game changer |
The way internet usage has evolved, we have been introduced to some interesting products recently. Google Friend Connect is one of them that is still in test mode but will be launched any week, in fact the Microsoft funded Facebook took everyone by surprise last week launching their new Facebook Connect widget. It seems Microsoft are fighting back, taking Google head on in a Social Media turf war that has just been stepped up a notch. Both widgets serve as plausible tools that are using the power of social media effectively.
With Facebook and Microsoft testing similar social connect technologies these days, it seems to be a new direction for the industry to focus on. We’ll find out more about this open-social based power play in the weeks to come, but for now, suffice it to say that these little innovations will go a long way for small and large website owners and social networking tragic’s alike.
When website owners add the widgets onto a site or blog, it will allow the website to act as it’s own social networking destination for users of Google or Facebook to join and invite their friends from any other social network to come and join them. From a website owner’s perspective, the good news is that you can customize the widget according to your interests, generate the code from Google or Facebook and insert it into your website without any hassle of programming. Furthermore, for analysis purposes you can generate “reports” and check the growth of your social network that has joined your site through these widgets.
When I say social network I mean a mini network of people who are all interested in the content your site offers, who have joined through either the Facebook or Google widgets placed on your website or blog pages that are directly connected to your members Facebook or Google Friend connect accounts. All this happens in only a few clicks and barely a few minutes.
Now as a user, you can sign up for any website with these widgets using your Gmail ID or Facebook ID. Interestingly enough, all the accounts that you have on social sites that you have ever joined, whether (Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo, Facebook or any other), will appear within the widget and you can source friends from those accounts asking them to join you at whichever website across the net you have joined.
Additionally, you can also publish activities that you perform on that website into your social networking profiles. This may help in the big boys aggregating together people with similar interests. You can keep a track of your friends who have joined the site and also keep others updated on your actions on that particular website through feeds & bookmarking.
If you publish content on your social network through a Friend Connect widget, friends sharing similar interests would be more inclined to check out the site. In this way a solid contact base can be aggregated into the social website. Also, you can initiate topics, share media, add photos, have polls or any sort of discussion on the website to interact with people who have similar interests as you.
The new “Open Social” developers code has been written into most big social networking sites, including our site Events Listed . Now, I am not a techie person, but from what I understand having been involved in the development of my application that has this functionality, is that this code slaps AA tags on text fields where there is communication between different members of any site. This text is stored in the Google word database with our names tagged against it. Now, privacy isn’t an issue because if we want to continue to have access to these multi-million dollar applications for FREE , we do it on their terms.
What this means is that this database knows who has commented on my wall and notes and what words they used. This is enough information to be able to know who I am, who my friends are and what I am interested in by the time I sign up through my Friend Connect widget on any website.
In this way, every blog or site can form a community around it. Communities where people of similar ideas and interests can interact, collaborate and socialize. Some people may think that this is what they do already. Nope, this is more like you visiting my blog about event marketing , you can join my community through either the Google Friend Connect widget or the Facebook Connect widget (we have integrated both and will be one of the first websites to have done so), once in your widget account (a pop up window whilst still at our blog) you can invite friends to join you from plaxo, Orkut, Gtalk if using the Google Friend Connect and if join through the Facebook widget all your Facebook friends. You can send them a message like, “hey come and join Events Listed its got some great event marketing strategies.” Your friends accept so are now a part of the Events listed Friend Connect community that is connected by not only the Events Listed community, but their common membership through the widget, gmail accounts, gtalk and the RSS feed from our blogs is automatically fed into their Google Feed reader. This means that if our blog represents great value it’s members can continuously invite more friends from other networks to join, the cycle of interacting and learning would continue to grow amongst like-minded people who are already connected in the bigger social networking communities - giving birth to a much easier form of interacting with people who share your interests.
Now, if we stopped providing great quality content, our community would start talking about leaving, amongst themselves through the chat function on the widget, in Facebook or through gtalk and quicker than we can say WAIT, our social audience has gone off. Marketing websites in the future will all be through word of mouth, we need to attract people who have contacts that listen to them so when they invite them to join a site, they will come through a common interest and trust factor.
To put it short, it adds the facility of having everything in one place with the comfort of being linked to everyone in multiple mini networks scattered across the internet. Considering we are all members of such social networking websites, it’s about time we integrate it effectively to attract people to our blogs and websites.
It also gives you the opportunity of increasing your social circle in the niches that count for you, you can anchor your general social network to Facebook whilst spending more time in the niche networks amongst consumers and friends who all have the same interests. Finally, for newbies who haven’t ever gotten their heads around RSS feeds and feed readers, don’t worry. You won’t need to any more because if you sign onto a blog social network through Google Friend Connect, you automatically receive that blogs feeds into your Google Reader that comes with your Google Friend Connect account.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.
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Tribalism - Speaking The lingo |
This is another excerpt from my book due out November 5th - “Social Traffic”
Always remember that the people you are marketing to are your online community. They are a community of people supporting your services, attending your events and communicating directly with you. If you want more people to contact you for services, manage their events or to buy your products, then it is important to build initial trust and credibility first.
Secondly, you need to be an active part of the community itself. Participate with the audience, ask them questions, discuss ideas, share thoughts, request feedback. This communication helps people in opening themselves up to you and become more inclined to use your services or attend your parties later on. Also, it is the best way to get a feel for audience expectations and early feedbacks of your events. Credibility comes from sharing insight, discussing thoughts and adding value to conversations. When people start to respect your opinion as a good one, they will become more inclined to becoming your customers.
The escalating online trends in social media, the increase in fancy new gadgets - all of these factors have paved ways for you to communicate with your market on more direct levels. This direct interaction brings you to downright human levels and potentially breaks all gaps between you and your customers. You can talk to them. You can listen to them. You can communicate with them. You can build loyalty. You can build relationships of trust. You can do so much, just by leveraging different tools to form a bridge between you and your customers…
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Object Orientated Social Map |
This is an excerpt from my book due out November 5th - “Social Traffic”
There has been a lot of discussion to understand the social ecosystem that has been built around a person’s online existence. Because of my interest in anthropology and sociology, I spend a significant amount of my time studying online trends. What’s most interesting is that when you start plotting your social network on a graph it comes up with such an intertwined complex network consisting of different platforms and nodes - all relevant to your online existence in some way or another.
A lot of people have used complicated ways to illustrate our online social maps. In theory its actually quite simple. If you think about the different websites or applications that you use, you’ll notice that there is an actual thing (or object) that forms the basic cohesive power.
When I go to Wikipedia, the object is information. When I go to eBay, the object is the product. When I go to Flickr, the objects are the pictures. The objects are the underlying value that the site offers and differentiates itself with. Websites that forget to focus on an object, lose the social media game. The reason why we call them objects is because we want you to feel like they are actual entities that form the heart of the application. Building your own applications may be difficult in this fast-paced cut-throat business, but associating yourself with existing social networks is easy. Instead of spending 5 to 20 thousand dollars to build a site which will have zero traffic initially, you can build a presence on different social networks at no cost and create hundreds of thousands of dollars of opportunities through it. The purpose of this book is to help you figure out how to do that on your own.
The image above is my view of the social map. It contains two key elements: collaboration and sharing. A few categories of sites emerge from these (marked in grey boxes), like “information”. These basic categories are sub-divided into different types of online applications (marked in red boxes). Everything outside the dotted box is based on an object of value offered. For example, when sharing information on your personal blog, the object of value is your “thoughts”.
In practice, when I starting plotting those graphs I realized that Milgram’s Six Degrees of
Separation theory isn’t that far from reality.
The way the internet has evolved - specifically web 2.0 technologies - we can effectively reach out to people we could never have previously dreamed of. The important thing for us to learn is how to make the most of these online networks without giving away or risking too much. Having said that, I’m going to dedicate the next section of this book (section 2.2) to walk you through the uses and benefits of different applications.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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