Social Media Success Summit 2010 continued yesterday, May 20th. The day’s sessions continued to build on the wealth of information provided throughout this year’s Summit with a great return performance by Facebook guru Mari Smith along with some insightful information on social news sites and a lively panel that consisted of three very popular bloggers, who weighed in how they use Twitter.

Day 6′s sessions were:

1. Facebook Engagement: Advanced Strategies for Building a Loyal Fan Base
2. Using Social News Sites to Grow Your Audience & Improve Your Search Engine Optimization
3. Twitter Power Panel: Tips & Insights From Twitter Superstars

Session 1: Facebook Engagement: Advanced Strategies for Building a Loyal Fan Base

Presenter: Mari Smith

While her Day 2 presentation on Facebook was excellent, I felt it went a bit too fast to keep up. In my opinion, her return appearance, however, was spot-on perfect timing wise. While her Day 2 presentation focused on Facebook design strategy, she picked up on Day 6 with developing strategies for Facebook content, promotion and engagement.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. Content is far more engaging when you mix it up. Sources for Facebook content include blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, interviews, etc. You can effectively repurpose this content for use on Facebook. Your overarching goal when it comes to Facebook content is to provide value.
2. You should feature other people’s content (OPC) as well, which you can get through blog and ezine subscriptions, Facebook friend lists (you can create a friend list from a collection of Facebook Fan pages) and Twitter lists.
3. Facebook plug-ins are available for content promotion, such as the Facebook Like button plug-in (which can be customized as a “Recommend” button and include a Comment box). Additional plug-ins are available at developers.facebook.com/plugins.
4. Facebook widgets are also available at facebook.com/facebook-wdigets. The Share Button, Page Button and Twitter Link widgets were discussed specifically.
5. If you use automated tools to push your Facebook content to Twitter, you need to be careful. For one thing, it’s good to present slightly different content so you add value at each outlet. Secondly, because of the 140-character limit in Twitter, your tweets will get truncated – usually in the wrong place and will be difficult for others to retweet.
6. Facebook ads provide the most targeted traffic money can buy. Facebook provides a wealth of information to help with your ad campaign including the estimated reach for specific demographics. Click the Advertising link in the footer of a Facebook page or go to www.facebook.com/advertising/ to access Facebook ad tools.
7. Be responsive and interact with fans. An effective Facebook engagement strategy should include responding to comments promptly (even assigning moderators if necessary), along with opportunities for live interaction, using tools like Vpype for video interaction or Clobby for chat.
8. Observe popular fan pages to see what’s working in terms of engagement. Offering content variety and regular updates (perhaps 3 to 5 per day) are also good ways to build engagement.
9. Track and monitor your engagement progress through Facebook Insights. Export the data for use in a custom Excel-based dashboard to track post quality ratings, interaction, etc.; use Facebook deep search to track and monitor mentions.
10. Beware of Facebook’s new Community pages: Carefully adjust your privacy settings to prevent your content from automatically appearing on Facebook’s Community pages, as you may not want it there.

Session 2: Using Social News Sites to Grow Your Audience & Improve Your Search Engine Optimization

Presenter: Muhammad Saleem

This session was all about how social activity supports your search engine optimization results. Specifically, how an influx of links from social news sites like Digg has a positive effect on your organic search rankings.

To get started with Digg:

• Research your target community and become a part of its subculture.
• Familiarize yourself with successful content and adapt your content to meet those standards.
• Research the most active and successful community members and network with those users to promote your content.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. Google doesn’t mind link bait (per Matt Cutts). Contrary to popular belief, Google is not opposed to using link bait to draw traffic to your site and, as a result, lift your search rankings.
2. Think long term. Using a short-term strategy for getting to the front page of sites like Digg will result in large traffic spikes, but the traffic gains will be short-lived. Using a longer-term strategy will allow your site to do well over time.
3. Don’t be seen as a spammer. You can promote you own content, but do it rarely to avoid annoying the community. It’s important to have diversity on who is submitting your content.
4. Digg is not the only social news site to consider. When it comes to social news sites, Digg gives you the biggest bang for buck and the highest exposure possible. Other niche social news sites, however, may be easier to get your content seen, may be relevant to you and can still act to get links to your site.
5. Digg those statistics. Important statistics include: Category popularity; average number of Diggs it takes to get promoted within a category; average link acquisitions by day of the week (so you know when to promote your content); link acquisition rates by subcategory. SocialBlade.com and di66.net are good sources for Digg statistics (although Di66 seems to be for sale at the moment).
6. Titles are crucial. A title structure of [Number][Adjective][Keyphrase], such as “20 Greatest Milestones in Tiger Woods’ Life” is a good formula to use in crafting a viral title.

Session 3: Twitter Power Panel: Tips & Insights From Twitter Superstars

Panelists: Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark – Rick Calvert, Moderator

As you might imagine, it was a pleasure to sit in on a discussion among three kings of the blogosphere: Chris Brogan, of ChrisBrogan.com, Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger.net and Brian Clark, of Copyblogger. The discussion – lively at times – focused on the similarities and differences of how they are using Twitter, both now and when they first became exposed to it.

Interesting Twitter Facts

• 44% of Twitter users are early adopters; only 22% of non-Twitter users are in the same category.
• 32% of Twitter users say their financial situation has improved over the past year; only 18% of non-Twitter users could say the same.
• In 2009, 26% of the U.S. population surveyed said they were aware of Twitter; in 2010 that number rose to 87%.
• 7% of the U.S. population is using Twitter; 41% of the U.S. population has a profile on Facebook.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. Twitter has a variety of uses. You shouldn’t view it as a single-purpose tool.
2. First impressions may be deceiving. The panelists’ first impressions of Twitter varied from a monumental waste of time to suspicion. It took Darren about 24 hours to see Twitter’s potential, whereas it took Brian a year to try it.
3. Newbies need not be intimidated. Best ways for newbies to get started with Twitter are to find people to follow who are relevant to your business, don’t expect to read every Tweet that goes by and provide value. Take advantage of Twitter’s search tools, listen in and participate.
4. Don’t auto follow. If you indiscriminately follow those who follow you, you are leaving yourself open to spam.
5. Pitching your products and services doesn’t work. Point to interesting content, create interesting content and the following will happen over time.
6. Twitter is a relationship-building tool. People buy from people they like and Twitter allows you to build those relationships that may eventually lead to some sort of transaction, partnership or joint venture.
7. Passion moves people to action. (Now there’s a deep thought!)
8. Twitter makes a good outpost, not a destination. Twitter and Facebook are social tools that are great to use as outposts to drive traffic to your home base (website or blog). (This reinforces the concept of identifying your home base and outposts discussed in a previous session.)
9. The results of your effort may not be apparent at first. You may tweet someone’s content and nothing comes of it for 6 months, when out of the blue you might get an offer to do a partnership or joint venture. Provide value to other people and don’t count exactly how you’ll get the return: It may be much bigger than you’d otherwise expect.
10. Give changes some time to take hold. The world of social media is constantly changing. There was agreement that all three typically waited for someone else to bring up new developments, technologies and tools. They don’t obsess on keeping up with everything as none of them has the time to worry about it.

Closing Comments

Darren:

Twitter is about enhancing people’s lives. If someone helps you, they make an impression and you notice them. Trust grows and they’ll want to spread the word. Be useful, be personal. Allow people to see part of your life and people will talk about it. If you’re going to use Twitter, use it regularly: You have to use Twitter for it to work for you.

Chris:

For me, 40-60% of revenues are received from things that happen via Twitter. Unless your job is tweeting, your job isn’t tweeting.

[In other words, don't let Twitter take over your life at the expense of your job or business.]

Brian: (Who said when he first learned of Twitter he laughed out loud and thought, “What a waste of time!”)

It’s important for business not to blow off social media. It’s not a fad; it’s not going away. However, it’s the fundamentals that matter. If you’re too busy to keep up it’s because you have a real business – that’s a good thing. Figure out how it works for you. Stay open-minded to new things but be ruthless about whether there’s a return and if it makes sense for you. Don’t just put on every new hat that comes out.

Social Media Success Summit – Index of Session Takeaways

Did you attend any of these sessions at the Social Media Success Summit 2010? If so, what were your takeaways? If not, what are your thoughts on building an engaged fan base in Facebook, using social news sites to improve your SEO efforts or your tips and insights regarding Twitter and other social media marketing tools?

Social Media Success Summit 2010 continued yesterday, May 13, 2010. Once again, the day was full of useful information and insight on getting the most out of social media for marketing purposes.

Unfortunately, my PC froze up during the final session. Of course, rebooting a PC means you’re not going to rejoin a live session in anything that resembles real time, but I did jump back in as soon as I could. The slides and videos of each session are made available to attendees after the fact, so I hope that I was still able to capture the essence of the final session.

Three sessions were held:

1. How to Bring Raving Customers Repeatedly to Your Local Business
2. 5 Social Media Case Studies Worth Close Examination
3. Creating Buzz With Social Media Contests

Session 1: How to Bring Raving Customers Repeatedly to Your Local Business

Panel: Andrew Mason (Groupon), Tristan Walker (Foursquare) and Narrator Rob Birgfeld (SmartBrief)

This session was all about getting foot traffic in the door of your local business, specifically through Foursquare and Groupon, two fairly recent social media tools that are growing rapidly.

Foursquare
Foursquare is a geolocation empowered social media mobile app that focuses on three segments for business development:

1. Sole proprietors with local stores
2. Mid-sized retailers
3. Big brands like Bravo, Starbucks, MTV and Pepsi.

The premise of Foursquare when you launch the app on your mobile phone is, “Tell us where you are and we’ll tell you who and what’s nearby”. Foursquare tells you where you’ve been (Nearby Favorites), as well as places your friends have and others have recommended nearby.

Foursquare use is game-based and involves checking it at a location and earning points; users try to unlock badges (tied to time, distance and location) and the user with the most points can be named Mayor for that location and earn freebies. The Swarm badge is unlocked by getting 50 people to check in at the same venue.

Foursquare can also be effective for promoting charitable causes, and an example was given of a Pepsi-sponsored campaign for the benefit of charity. Analytics tools are provided to track check-ins as well as other key metrics like top visitors and most recent check-ins.

Groupon
Groupon’s purpose is to harness the power of group buying by featuring a daily offer on the best local experiences in each of over 60 cities (soon to be expanded to 100, including European cities).

Users can get great deals on restaurants, theater tickets, spa packages and more buy buying coupons from Groupon, printing them out and then taking them to the sponsoring merchant. Merchants set up the promotion by contacting Groupon.

There is only one deal offered per day in each metro area, so there is a considerable waiting list. Merchants don’t pay anything unless and until their deal is featured, and then only if a targeted minimum number of users is reached.

Good deals can result in large crowds visiting a business in a single day, so Groupon gives the merchant a heads up in advance so the business will be ready for the influx of traffic.

Each Groupon deal includes a custom deal writeup, a monitored discussion forum, social media promotion on Facebook and Twitter and customer service.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. In both cases, social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook allow customers to rapidly spread the word. If merchants give customers a great experience when they come in, the customers can be expected to spread the word.
2. Like other social media platforms discussed in the Summit, neither Groupon or Foursquare should be considered a “quick fix”, but should instead be considered a way to reach a large number of potential customers over time.

Session 2: 5 Social Media Case Studies Worth Close Examination

Presenter: Ann Handley (Marketing Profs)

This session was a discussion of the common traits of the case studies examined by MarketingProfs of those who have succeeded with social media: that they are friendly to the customer, focused, and fertile (having viral potential) and that they have repurposed their content creatively across more than one social media channel, including blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Disney’s Promotion of Pinocchio
Case studies examined included Disney’s promotion for its re-release of the movie Pinocchio, in which Disney used Twitter as its main promotional platform. The campaign involved promotion by a Twitter power user, Melanie Notkin (@savvyauntie) as her followers best fit the demographics that Disney was targeting.

In just three weeks, more than 300 tweets about the movie were made, a special hashtag of #disneysa was created to track the conversation and short, trackable URLs were used for analytics.

The Coffee Groundz – First Order on Twitter
The second case study was for The Coffee Groundz: a 2-year-old Houston coffee shop who wanted to differentiate themselves from their many competitors. One of the owners started using Twitter informally to interact with friends and customers. A month later he got a tweet from a customer to see if the customer could place an order to go via Twitter, and it is believed this was the first to-go order ever placed on Twitter. Word-of-mouth about the order spread and the shop received a lot of favorable publicity.

Over time, the company made it a regular practice to process Twitter orders, give tips on making better coffee and began hosting local tweet-ups. The number of followers have skyrocketed since and business increased in the area of 30%.

General Mills Fiber One Cereal
General Mills used Facebook, YouTube and a blog to promote the good taste of its Fiber One cereal, calling the campaign, “Coping with Disbelief”. The campaign attracted 25,000 Facebook fans, and an unexpected volume of fan interaction. General Mills let the customers take control.

Intel – Live Music Animations
Intel created an animation app that users could download in order to create their own short animation. Each week, users who created the best animations won prizes. Users could submit animations or vote on those submitted by others.

The end result was that 17,000 people in 101 countries downloaded the app and participated. The Facebook Fan page drew 56,000 fans. The final film, consisting of the best entries, was shown worldwide.

Forty – A Phoenix-Based Marketing Agency
Forty placed ads on Facebook that reached 13,000 people within their targeted audience. True to their name, the Facebook ads cost the company less than $400. Two types of engagement ads were used to test a pure branding approach: one using the company’s logo and tagline and the other using ads that featured photos of individual Forty employees with a description of what their role was within the agency.

The staff photo ads far outperformed the logo and tagline ads. In total, over 1 million ad impressions were served and 1 of 11 people who saw the ads clicked through, giving Forty considerable brand awareness for a very small investment.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. J.R. Cohen of The Coffee Groundz offered sound advice for businesses using Twitter: “Just be yourself. That will take you farther than you could ever imagine.”
2. Let your customers take control of the conversation. Listen and offer help, but don’t butt in.
3. If used effectively, social media offers a relatively inexpensive means to reach a very large, targeted crowd.
4. Reuse and re-purpose content across all of the social media channels in which you engage your customers.
5. If you stay friendly and focused, your social media efforts can prove to be very fertile.

Session 3: Creating Buzz With Social Media Contests

Presenter: Michael Stelzner

This session featured step-by-step tactics that can be used to create social media contests with viral results. Contests may be rewards based (win a prize with economic value) or prestige based (recognition for being named to the top 10 for something, e.g.).

One example of each type of contest was discussed: The contest to win free tickets to the Social Media Success Summit (rewards based) and a contest to name the Top 10 Social Media bloggers (prestige based).

Main Session Takeaways:

1. Contests offer several benefits: they excite customers, drive traffic, increase exposure, sell products and can engage customers and prospects because they’re fun and memorable.
2. Offering a compelling reward for taking an easy action and promoting it through social media can create the “Perfect Marketing Storm”, a domino effect that occurs through social sharing.
3. Social media contests offer viral potential. The contest to win free SMSS tickets had 1400+ retweets in a matter of days. Most activity takes place in the first few days.
4. Prizes need to be valuable; required actions to win need to be very easy and explained clearly in a skimmable fashion; you’ll want to line up partners to help you spread the word. Contestants will then share information on the contest and their participation with their social media connections.

Social Media Success Summit – Index of Session Takeaways

Have you used Foursquare or Groupon? Have you held a contest that was promoted via social media? What were your experiences? If you attended any of these Social Media Success Summit 2010 sessions, we’d love to hear your thoughts on and your thoughts on social media marketing in general.

Social Media Success Summit 2010 continued yesterday, May 11, 2010. Like the first two days, Day 3 was packed full of information on how to get the most out of your social media initiatives and picked up right where Day 2 left off.

Three sessions were held:

1. Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn
2. How Big Businesses are Leveraging Social Media
3. 3 Reasons You Need a YouTube Strategy

I feel fortunate to have attended all three sessions in their entirety. What follows is a summary and a listing of the major takeaways from each session. Strap yourself in and come along for the ride.

Session 1: Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn: The Business Social Network

Presenter: Lewis Howes

Lewis Howes is a former arena football player turned author, speaker and entrepreneur. Due to an injury he spent 6 months living on his sister’s couch. After a mentor invited him to join LinkedIn, he ended up spending 6-8 hours per day every day learning the ins and outs of LinkedIn.

Some LinkedIn Stats

• There are 65 million business professionals on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn has the world’s largest audience of influential, affluent professionals, with an average annual household income of $109,000 per year.
• 1 person joins LinkedIn every second of every day.
• 45% of LinkedIn’s members are actual business decision makers. Nearly one in two are able to make a decision without getting an approval from a higher-up. This is a considerably higher ratio of decision makers than found on Facebook or Twitter.
• LinkedIn recommendations carry considerable weight. The best way to get a recommendation is to give one first.

The presentation focused on getting the most out of your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn apps.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. To rank well in a LinkedIn search, you need to choose one or two keywords to target and then optimize your LinkedIn profile for those targeted keywords.
2. Your profile also needs to be interesting and easy to read. Think of your profile as a speech with your headline being the opening introduction. Talk about who you are, who you help and how you help those individuals.
3. Join as many LinkedIn groups as possible within your niche. (LinkedIn’s current limit is 50). The larger the group the better.
4. Creating your own LinkedIn group is an excellent way to stay in touch with your contacts as you can craft a Welcome message that acts as an autoresponder with a call to action each time someone joins the group. As the group owner, you can also send a message once a week to the entire group in which you can share links, create additional calls to action, etc. Subgroups are great for items of regional interest, such as local events.
5. Some LinkedIn apps to consider are the WordPress app, which adds your 3 latest blog posts to your LinkedIn profile; the Amazon app (Reading List by Amazon) is great for authors as it allows you to link directly to your books on Amazon from your LinkedIn profile; the SlideShare app allows you to place a video, such as a Welcome video, on your profile; the Twitter app feeds your tweets into your LinkedIn profile.
6. The LinkedIn Events tool can be an amazing promotional tool for your events.
7. You can have only one LinkedIn profile and you can add a Company page; You can’t create a Company profile, only a Company page. Users can now follow companies.
8. LinkedIn’s biggest strength is its ability to export your contacts (as a CSV or VCF file, to Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo Mail, etc.). Neither Facebook nor Twitter allow you to export fan or follower contact data.

Session 2: How Big Businesses Are Leveraging the Power of Social Media

Panel: John Bernier (Best Buy), Marla Erwin (Whole Foods), Sarah Molinari (Home Depot)

This session was a panel discussion with social media representatives from Best Buy, Whole Foods and Home Depot. Each panelist gave a brief overview presentation of their company’s experience with social media. After the initial presentations the floor was opened up to a Q&A discussion.

Whole Foods
Whole Foods is active on Twitter (@WholeFoods), Facebook, YouTube and flickr. They use a global account on each of these outlets, which is used primarily for customer service and occasional promotional content. They also have additional topical accounts on Twitter for recipes (@WholeRecipes), cheese (@WFMCheese), and wine/beer (@WFMWineGuys).

In addition, Whole Foods has approximately 215 fan pages on Facebook from their local stores; Several metro-area Twitter accounts that cover metropolitan areas like New York and many local Twitter accounts focused on the local stores.

Whole Foods also has global accounts on YouTube and flickr. They have a single, global YouTube account, which they use primarily to showcase the videos from their website in order to take advantage of YouTube’s sharing and user interaction tools. Their flickr presence originally started as a way to feature their resident store artists, who prepare the sandwich boards at each store. Now their flickr focus is more on photos of store events and community events in which they are involved.

Whole Foods corporate publishes a monthly Social Media Support Guide in order to provide cohesive guidelines to those who oversee local and sub accounts. Whole Foods is now looking into emerging geolocation services, including FourSquare and Gowalla.

Best Buy
Best Buy maintains a social media presence on Twitter (@BestBuy and @TwelpForce), Facebook and a number of YouTube channels. Facebook Fan pages include a central corporate presence and local store pages. Their YouTube channels feature their own videos, videos generated by merchant and vendor partners and user-generated content.

Best Buy’s main social media focus seems to be on their TwelpForce Twitter account as it is an important outlet for customer service. They use Twitter as a tool to talk with and not TO customers: they don’t use TwelpForce to promote their products to their followers. Instead, the intent of TwelpForce is to answer and and all questions about technology and products, respond to complaints and provide near real-time tech support.

They also use TwelpForce for buyer updates and sending out tweets about free concerts and other events. Their pledge behind TwelpForce is to “Help customers know all that we know, as fast as we know it”.

Some 2,600 Best Buy employees participate in responding to daily tweets; some employees (power users) are much more active than others.

Home Depot
Home Depot got off to an informal start in social media and had the benefit of early executive-level buy in. Their social media team gathers with their cross-functional peers monthly to discuss progress and strategy. It also distributes a weekly executive dashboard.

Home Depot’s use of social media is centered around customer service and providing a means for personalized outreach, giving customers a point of contact with a real person.

Early on in their involvement with YouTube and Twitter they pulled from existing resources to participate. Now they have a trained team of agents for social interaction and social media has a company-wide focus.

Home Depot monitors social sites that matter to them, like Yelp, GetSatisfaction and Planet Feedback. In this way, social media acts as a feedback loop to the business, much as more traditional outlets, like snail mail, phone calls, etc. have been used in the past.

Home Depot started its Twitter presence in early 2008 to resolve customer issues and discuss timely matters. They maintain a handful of Twitter accounts, including @homedepotdeals, @homedepotfdn, @homedepot racing. One of the most common ways they are using Twitter now is for weather events like hurricanes – with real time tips and store info.

Home Depot launched its Facebook presence in June of 2009 and originally started picking up fans through word of mouth before trying Facebook ads a year later. Home Depot’s Facebook dialog consists primarily of consumers and associates talking about their communities, stores and homes.

Home Depot uses YouTube for syndication of How-To videos they already had on their site. They also used it to publish a video response to a shareholders meeting. They find that YouTube has been helping create awareness around the videos they have to offer.

Home Depot believes their level of current involvement in social media is just the tip of the iceberg for them. They are actively engaging in blogs and forums and are piloting an informal network for their store associates.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. You can promote your social media accounts on your website, blog, in print materials and in ads. Whole Foods also promotes their local social media presence on storefront signs and on store sandwich boards.
2. All three agreed that social media is not a campaign for them: it’s a permanent, on-going initiative and that’s the way it needs to be in order to be successful.
3. There was also agreement that promoting your social media outlets by using one or more landing pages on your website is a great idea as it provides a place for customers to find verified locations for Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc. It also provides a place to create an awareness of all of the social media outlets available from a central location.
4. Focus where the dialog is already happening; use your existing content and knowledge assets in your social media activities.
5. You can’t control everything that’s being said about your or your brand on social media, but you should monitor what’s going on; Take feedback seriously.
6. Social media is about listening to the conversation: Not butting in where you’re not wanted or constantly promoting yourself.
7. Make mistakes early and take risks and then figure out what people want from you.

Session 3: 3 Reasons You Need a YouTube Marketing Strategy (and Tips to Help You Generate Results)

Presenter: Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe specializes in video production and SEO.

Some YouTube and Online Video Stats

• 86% of U.S. Internet users view online video content at least once a month, whereas 80% of users visit a social networking site at least once a month.
• 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In fact, more video content is uploaded to YouTube in 24 days than ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC have broadcast in the past 24 years.
• Of 72 online video sites tracked, YouTube enjoys over 84% of the market share.
• Contrary to popular belief, the average video on YouTube gets only 100 views in its first month.
• Short viewer attention spans meant that your video will start losing viewers within the first 10 seconds: most viewers don’t watch beyond 60 seconds.

Main Session Takeaways:

1. If you want to engage customers on YouTube, you’ll need to develop an effective YouTube strategy in order to avoid the pitfalls, seize opportunities and not allow your YouTube activities to hog all of your time.
2. The primary way to get more views of your video on YouTube is to optimize your videos for YouTube search. In this regard, keyword research is important, just as it is in content marketing and SEO for your blog or website. However, you’ll want to use YouTube’s own Keyword Suggestion Tool as the keywords used for video search can vary quite a bit from those used in a Google search.
3. YouTube has its own search algorithm, which is different from Google, Bing and Yahoo search.
4. Because of the short attention span of viewers, it’s important to front load your important content in your video.
5. YouTube’s blog – Creator’s Corner – provides ideas for creating more compelling video content. YouTube’s Insights (available under My Account) includes a section called “Hot Spots” that shows where people were watching and where they decided to bail out.
6. Posting new videos on a consistent basis can help you build your subscriber base, much like blogging does when posts are published on a consistent schedule.
7. Allow your videos to be embedded elsewhere: don’t shut that off. You can also embed your videos into your Facebook page. Views on a blog or on a Facebook page where your video is embedded count as views on YouTube and can get your videos higher rankings in YouTube search. In most cases, embedded views can almost double the audience you can get from YouTube alone.
8. Publishing videos on YouTube first, and then embedding them in your blog is better than just embedding them within a post on your blog. Make it a habit.
9. Promote your videos: mention them on your website. You can also place and promote videos on certain wire services, like PR Web.
10. YouTube videos, for the most part, are limited to 10 minutes. If you have a longer video, you could consider a service like Vimeo, but know that Vimeo doesn’t have nearly the audience that YouTube does.

Social Media Success Summit – Index of Session Takeaways

Did you attend any of these sessions at the Social Media Success Summit 2010? If so, what were your takeaways. If not, what are your thoughts on using LinkedIn for marketing and developing a YouTube or other social media marketing strategy? What are your thoughts on how Whole Foods, Best Buy and Home Depot are using social media?

Please don’t misunderstand my title. I’m in favor of customizing the audience’s online marketing experience. Just ask any of our clients. We always recommend ways to tailor content to the specific needs and interests of their target market.

What we don’t advocate, however, is insulting the audience’s intelligence in the process.

Like millions of other people around the world, I waste several hours a week on Facebook. This online community typically does a great job of using my personal preferences to show me ads that interest me.

Do I want to know about the upcoming fiction workshop in New York with Robert McKee? You bet. Would I like to join a new group for caramel lovers? Why not?

But am I really going to click on an ad because females in New Jersey of a specific age are eligible for a $500 gift card at the local discount chain? No way.

And it’s not because of a bias against discount chains. A similar ad from my favorite clothing retailer evokes an equally negative response.

Using my personal information to grab my attention when it has no relevance to your offer is a cheap ploy. It makes me wonder, do you really think I’m that dumb?

Maybe it works, and that’s why I keep seeing half a dozen of these ads every time I log on for my Farmville fix.

We recommend a different approach to customizing content: one that respects the audience and offers real value.