Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

Many Internet marketers get caught up in arguments over the most important strategy to improve conversion rates: search engine optimization (SEO) or conversion rate optimization (CRO). They talk about them as if one must be chosen over the other when, in practice, they are anything but mutually exclusive. SEO and CRO go hand in hand and must work together for a website to be successful.
And what ultimately defines success? Conversions. Whether converting a casual browser on the SERPs to a visitor on your website through SEO or converting that visitor into a customer through CRO, it’s clear that these strategies are tightly linked. Let’s begin by defining the most basic goals of SEO and CRO. The goal of SEO is to achieve high rankings in search engines for keywords that most closely match a user’s query, and the goal of CRO is to increase the number of visitors that are converted into customers. These are obviously simplified definitions, but they demonstrate the close connection between SEO and CRO and the role each plays to improve conversion rates.

Both SEO and CRO focus on website visitors. SEO wants to find prospects based on what and where they are searching and provide them with a reason to visit a website, and CRO wants to create the best possible user experience when they arrive. To succeed in both requires an understanding of the user’s intent, which will also help determine the quality of the visitors. Qualified visitors are far more likely to be ready to make a buying decision than unqualified visitors who may only be searching for information or even be unaware of why they ended up on a particular landing page in the first place.
Read more: ClickZ
LiveRail Launches Brand Safety Alliance For Video Advertisers
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LiveRail, the first real-time video ad technology platform for publishers, networks and agencies, today unveiled the Video Brand Safety Alliance, a series of technology partnerships providing advertisers, agencies, publishers and networks with the highest degree of safety available for in-stream video placements.

The launch combines best-in-class offerings from Affine, comScore validated Campaign Essentials, DoubleVerify, Proximic, AdSafe Media, and TRUSTe with LiveRail’s own reporting, analytics, and video ad serving. All of the technology partners are now natively available to the more than 200 publishers, networks and agencies that utilize LiveRail’s video infrastructure technology.
The Brand Safety Alliance gives every player in the video advertising ecosystem access to a holistic view of brand safety. Agencies and networks can now offer their brand partners insight into URLs, semantic page content, and the content of the actual video accompanying ad impressions. In addition, advertisers and publishers can utilize privacy compliance solutions to incorporate privacy notice and choice into their video ads.
LiveRail customers can now take advantage of Affine’s industry-leading image-recognition software to automatically classify and tag the video in which their ads appear. With Affine’s frame-by-frame video analysis technology, advertisers now have the data needed to determine if video content aligns with campaign objectives and brand safety specifications.
DoubleVerify’s technology will provide brand safety targeting data before the advertisement is sent to the video player ensuring brands only run the highest quality environments for all video campaigns. In addition, advertisers can make use of TRUSTe privacy compliance solutions, ensuring they comply with industry self-regulation efforts and maintain consumer trust.
The new technology partners are the latest example of LiveRail’s dedication toward complete brand safety and transparency in online video. The LiveRail Safety Alliance supplements the company’s existing URL whitelisting and syndication management capabilities, ensuring video ads never appear in environments an ad buyer deems unsafe.

Read more: BusinessWire

Platform Connects Marketers and Customers Beyond the Search Engine Network

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Jul 14, 2011) – Magnetic (http://www.magnetic.is), the leader in search retargeting, today announced the Beta release of its new self-service platform, Magnetic Focus. Magnetic Focus challenges the boundaries of search, enabling agencies and search engine marketers to use display or text ads to reach consumers at any point of their online experience, even beyond the search engine network, where the search was initiated.

“Magnetic Focus is redefining the role of the search engine,” says Magnetic CEO Josh Shatkin-Margolis. “This new platform enables advertisers to move beyond the search engine and retarget customers that have already shown themselves to be interested in product or service. Now we have Magnetic Frame for display ads, Magnetic Field for ad network and exchanges and Magnetic Focus to complete our search retargeting trifecta. It allows advertisers to take the power of search beyond the search engine.”

Read More: Marketwire

Glam Media Introduces Glam 2.0—The Next Generation Digital Media Model

Glam Launches GlamCreate, the Company’s First Owned and Managed Content Platform, to Create, Contribute, Curate, Host and Showcase Digital Content

Glam also Introduces GlamConnect, the First Professional Content Social Networking Platform to Help Build Communities with Journalists, Authors, Bloggers and Content Creators that Share Deep, Passionate Interests

SILICON VALLEY, Calif. and NEW YORK, July 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Glam Media, Inc. (www.GlamMedia.com), the number one vertical media company with the largest online global reach for women, today announced a revolutionary new Owned & Managed content model, Glam 2.0. The model enables digital content creators to build their brands, connect with other influencers and consumers, showcase their content in a big way and create new brand revenue streams.

The Glam 2.0 content model is powered by two recently developed technology platforms, GlamCreate, a content-management and showcasing platform, and GlamConnect, the first social networking platform for professional authors, bloggers and journalists.

These new platforms provide the ultimate toolbox for professional authors to create and broadcast authentic content across multiple social streams all in one place. GlamCreate and GlamConnect are initially available in an invite only beta version in Glam Media’s newest vertical, Bliss.com for Health and Wellness Seekers, and will be available for existing and additional content verticals in the coming months.

Read More: PRNewswire

If there were any doubt that the mobile moment has arrived and that video will be a key part of it, then Cisco will help lay it to rest this week. The network hardware behemoth predicts that worldwide mobile data traffic will have increased 26-fold between 2010 and 2015 for a compound annual growth rate of 92% for the five-year period. The proliferation of connected devices and the insatiable appetite for streaming video across those devices will be the key drivers of this massive surge in mobile traffic, Cisco says.

There will be 5.6 billion Internet-enabled mobile devices in market worldwide by 2015. Video will be responsible for 66% of that mobile traffic, a 35-fold increase for the five-year period. And while we are tossing out impressive growth numbers, Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast sees mobile traffic coming from tablets alone increasing 205%.

Read More: MediaPost

SEO + SEM + SMO = ROI

Everyone’s doing “digital” now, and many surveys say that most advertisers will increase the majority of their digital budgets in 2011. But what is not so certain is whether the advertisers or their agencies will be deploying those dollars wisely and effectively across digital tactics. In fact, a recent compilation of studies shows that most marketers openly acknowledge their lack of understanding of many of the diverse digital tactics and seek to improve their knowledge. So it may be worthwhile to revisit some of the well-worn acronyms – SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing, aka “paid search”), SMO (social media optimization), and ROI (return on investment) – and get back to the basics of what they are, why they’re important, and how to do each correctly.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

In a world where users’ first instincts are to go online to look up the answer for pretty much anything, search engine optimization should be the first thing on advertisers’ digital to-do list. After all, “if they can’t find you, you don’t exist.” At a minimum, advertisers’ websites that are a few years old should be revisited with an eye towards whether the content is in text or HTML format so that search engines can index it. Many sites built in recent years still excessively use Flash and graphics and are thus “hurting themselves” because content inside graphics cannot be indexed by search engine crawlers. So while the site looks pretty to human eyes, it looks blank to search engines because the content is hidden. There are further advanced techniques to ensure proper and complete indexing (see Glenn Gabe’s e-book “Taking Control Of Your Online Marketing”).

 Read More: ClickZ

With so many new exchanges and exchange-like companies coming into existence, there is a tremendous opportunity for new kinds of efficiencies and optimization if marketers can learn how best to take advantage of all these companies. An exchange is any interactive platform that lets buyers and sellers flexibly get access to partners’ budgets and inventory. These may or may not include automated bidding systems, targeting, real-time pricing or other sophisticated mechanisms. They may just be phone-order-based systems for connecting buyers and sellers.

Read More: Adotas

What Will Happen in 2010

Predictions may be more useful for the writer than the reader. After all, if you’re as specific or as provocative as you should be, you’re going to be wrong at least half the time, and that’s not a very dependable percentage to prove your worthiness as a futurist. For me and other prognosticators, though, predictions are a useful way to ready ourselves for the coming year (OK, it’s already here)–to tell ourselves what to pay attention to and to provide a vantage point for assessing the many events and announcements to come. So here’s my attempt to predict a bit of what’s going to happen in technology, mainly on the Internet–that is, the scattered parts of it I pay attention to. I’m also going to follow up with two separate but related posts: what won’t happen this year, and what I wish would happen but probably won’t.

Read More: RobHof.com

Let The Nexus One Marketing Blitz Begin

As you’ve probably heard by now, this morning Google finally officially announced the first Google Phone: The Nexus One. Plenty of reviewers and geeks are fawning over the new device, but some are proposing that it won’t even make a blip on the radar for your average consumer. In fact, earlier this evening the Wall Street Journal quoted one analyst as saying, “Unless [Google] gives it a big push with marketing dollars, which they are not, consumers aren’t going to know the phone exists.”

Read More: TechCrunch