Posts by Amanda Porrelli

4 Reasons You Need Killer Content

March 14, 2012

Internet marketing isn’t all search engine algorithms, email lists and targeted on-page advertising. If you’ve taken much of a look into the subject recently you will no doubt have been overwhelmed by the amount of attention being paid to content marketing. This sudden increase in coverage of the subject underlines the importance of content in a changing digital marketing environment and highlights exactly why you should prioritise it in your online offering. Content marketing covers everything from the copy on a website, to podcasts, advertising videos and blogs, infographics and white papers, and everything in between. Each facet of this chameleonic marketing discipline can have a different effect on your business. Four of these effects are laid out below, as well as some examples of a piece of stellar content marketing that has fulfilled these objectives.

SEO

As a leader in SEO we’d be remiss not to mention the benefits that excellent content marketing can have for SEO: simply creating targeted, search engine friendly copy for your sales pages can be a huge boost to your website’s visibility, but there’s much more content can do for you. Dating websites such as OKCupid and Zoosk create dozens of inbound links to their websites by putting out well-timed infographics that relate to current events, including the Oscars and the Super Bowl, while Basecamp creator 37signal’s corporate blog drives a lot of traffic and links their way.

Exposure and Branding

Dollar Shave Club launched in April 2011, but noise around the start-up soon fizzled out. To drive interest, Mike Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club, put together the following advert that cost a measly $4,500 to produce. The effects were staggering; Dollar Shave Club managed to net 5,000 subscribers on the video’s launch date, despite the website becoming unavailable for large swathes of the day as it struggled to cope with the additional traffic. That number is now in excess of 12,000, with the company’s social networks seeing a similar overnight boost. The success in both sales figures and brand recognition has drawn comparison with the hugely popular ‘Old Spice Guy’ adverts.

Community Building and Management

There is no better example of what content marketing can do for your community than Lady Gaga. This megastar is more than just one of the most marketable celebrities on the planet, she’s also a social media powerhouse. With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and a billion views on Youtube, Lady Gaga has built her following up through creating engaging content for fans both old and new and also by engaging with fan created content. Gaga regularly reposts “fan art” created by her fans and creates her own content in response to input from her fans. By “giving the people what they want”, Gaga has built up a loyal and extremely responsive community.

Sales and Investment

At the beginning of February Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Productions and creator of some of the world’s most enduring and popular video games, launched a project through crowdfunding platform Kickstarter aimed at creating a new adventure game – a genre seen as commercially risky to most investors and publishers. Initially seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month to fund both the development of the game and a documentary detailing its creation, the project reached this goal in just nine hours thanks to Schafer’s cleverly crafted content marketing strategy that included videos and minigames, as well as the enthusiasm of fans. After 24 hours the fund had netted more than a million dollars and by the time the project closed on Tuesday the total had rocketed to three million dollars, making it the most successful Kickstarter project in history.

0 Comments

A Kloutless Guide to Social Influence

December 6, 2011

You may remember my blog about Klout and social influence metrics from a few weeks back. One of my primary talking points was how the way these metrics work can fly in the face of good social media behaviour to the degree that users are actively dissuaded from interacting with anyone besides influencers and are penalised for high levels of engagement.

In my view as a consequence of this these tools don’t always get it right when it comes to how truly influential a social media account actually is. Even though your social influence score can be important, what’s most important is engaging with your audience in a meaningful way. Achieve this and you’ll be on your way to being a top social media influencer in no time, even if your Klout score doesn’t say so.

With that in mind, here are the six main behaviours I think that a true influencer displays: (more…)

0 Comments

Do Social Influence Metrics Have Klout?

November 11, 2011

When Klout changed their algorithm for social influence scoring at the tail-end of October, a cry went out around the internet as many people saw their Klout scores nose-dive and their egos take a bruising. Some people even said the changes cost them their jobs.

Klout’s new model represents the “biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history,” said Ash Rust, Director of Ranking at Klout on Klout’s official blog, but many influencers begged to differ. Was there much point in influencers jumping to the defence of their previous scores or was it all sound and noise, signifying nothing? Are social influence metrics doing influential users justice and are they providing a true reflection of a person’s influence?

I did a bit of crowdsourcing on Twitter and the consensus wasn’t positive. Most respondents said they only use social influence aggregators to track their own score, while those who use it professionally say they only utilise it to give them a basic idea of someone’s possible influence before looking into their online behaviours manually. (more…)

3 Comments