Jay Neely

Hey Sean, what do you think are the best opportunities for exposure through earned media today? Which channels are still new enough to be uncrowded / low-noise / low-control from the service (as opposed to say, Facebook), but popular enough to be worthwhile?

If you're an SEOmoz user interested in seeing the new / lost links feature get added to Open Site Explorer, there's a feature request open here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21441162-ose-to-include-new-lost-and-dates-for-links-like-ahrefs

Also an example of having your company name auto-appended to a headline not being the best idea.

I might be missing something here, but wouldn't privacy settings prevent a brand from seeing a lot of the info on a profile, causing it any many cases to appear empty? Which doesn't invalidate any of their findings around groups of profiles with a similar pattern of rapid brand-liking behavior.

I'm surprised not to see http://dribbble.com/ or perhaps even Slideshare (though I hope https://speakerdeck.com/ gains traction) mentioned in the article. I wonder what other platforms fit into the "knowledge production" / "collaborative work" category the article discusses.

Nice to see user image including a personal photo as a factor; businesses shouldn't hide the person behind the account. Associating a person with the brand makes everything from getting followers to building relationships with influencers much easier.

Matt, I found the links included in this very valuable. The article itself is painful to read, however. It's not your writing, but the formatting. Centered multi-line headings, bad padding between headers and content, too much space between lists, bolded italicized underlined serif text... it's an unscannable wall of text. I'd highly recommend taking a look at some of the equally lengthy posts done by blogs like SEOmoz and KISSmetrics - exhaustive guides can be very valuable, but only if they're easily readable. I know how much effort you must have put into writing a post like this; setting CSS styles to ensure legibility is a one-time extra effort that will make a huge difference in how well received your content is.

Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferris are two of the most effective people I know at promoting a product. This article is long, but worth it.

Awesome. re: category bugs, everything (initially?) appearing as "SEO" was the main one I saw. Looking forward to the launch and thereafter!

I'm unclear on what changes have been made to date, what's in the works, and what's been suggested by users that you're considering *or* aren't interested in. There's a lot from the beta feedback thread that I haven't seen responded to: - Lots of issues with categories. Category bugs, difficulty finding the right category, suggestions that for now we scrap categories. - Comment functionality. Editing, deleting, sorting, collapsing, notification. You've said email notifications would be really difficult -- is there an on-site solution that might be easier? Even if it's just listing on our profile pages where we've commented so we can check for replies. - Page links formatting. Title truncation, too much space between links, need for visited-link style. All of the above are things mentioned by at least two people, receiving several upvotes (4 still seems to be above-average at the moment), that didn't have replies from Casey, Dharmesh, or Rand (except one of the notifications). I totally get that all three of you are very busy; the people providing feedback are too. Letting them know it's been heard, at the least, is one of the best ways to keep them providing it. If this site is going to succeed, it will need a strong core community of active users. Being communicative about the progress being made will help us feel part of it.

I think you're missing out, Tad. Reddit can have its obnoxious moments, but it's a constant source of great content, insightful discussion, and a ton of traffic for the few things I've promoted on it. Reddit advertising in particular is a well-targetable cost-effective option marketers should know about.

Love seeing new ideas and specific tactics -- hope you and others will submit more like this.

Looked into this, and the stat is from ComScore: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20120110-909344.html "The other properties in the category are Yelp (#1); CityGrid (#2), Yahoo! Local (#3), and CBS Local (#5)." Does anyone know where the actual data can be found? I've searched around on the ComScore site, but either I'm missing it or it's not public.

This is really useful as a reference checklist for a lot of the details that can be easy to forget about when working on a new project. It was created in 2008, though, and is very light on social media, makes no mention of mobile web considerations. If anyone knows of something similar checklists, whether focusing on more specific areas or that have been done more recently, I'd love to see them.

The biggest problem is that Facebook keeps decreasing the opportunity for earned media, to support its paid media business. Facebook users are seeing fewer posts from brands they've Liked in their timeline, which leads to lower engagement, which leads to seeing fewer posts, etc. There are several Pages I'm a fan on that I would like to see every update from -- there's no way for me to tell Facebook this. There's no 'subscribe' feature like there is for profiles, and even though I Like and comment on their posts, I typically will only see a photo-type post (seems to have the highest Edgerank weight for Page and profile updates alike) and never their link-type posts. At the same time, Facebook is moving more and more to sponsored story and page post ad types. I feel like there's been a bit of a bait and switch here. Many brands have spent a lot of money on Facebook ads to gain fans, under the assumption it was a one-time expense for them to build a channel. Further paid advertising would be for promotions, to reignite engagement from fans that have tuned out, and to expand their reach. But it hasn't worked that way. Instead, Facebook demoted Page-sent messages to a secondary, almost-invisible inbox. Then it removed the feature entirely. Now Page status updates are being shown less often. Brands who thought they had paid to opt-in fans to receive updates are now finding they paid to build a channel of fans they could pay to further advertise to.

Using your specific comparison... "Should you focus on enhancing one large, greatly insightful piece of content, or should you consistently write about that topic?" ... I'd actually do a mix. If the subject has enough depth for you to dedicate a category (or even a whole blog) to it, each post is an opportunity for you to get links, show Google you have fresh content, and promote something relevant but different on your social channels (as opposed to tweeting "just updated my _____ guide" so many times people start to ignore it). Many separate posts also allow you to better target a range of long-tail keywords. At the same time, consolidating all of your content around a subject into a single, more organized and cohesive format provides you with a valuable information product (you don't have to sell it, but instead use it's value to overcome resistance to some action you desire from your readers, like signing up for a newsletter) that has potential to rank for a higher-volume keyword. Your mini posts can reference this piece of content regularly, and once-per-month update announcements can even be another regular post type. Examples of this strategy can be seen with InsideFacebook.com and the Facebook Marketing Bible. Or SEOmoz's blog, where frequent fresh posts (which at SEOmoz's scale are high-quality pieces of content by themselves) regularly reference mega-content like the Search Ranking Factors or Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Great article, but definitely a case where I think it would have made sense to edit the submission title to better explain what it contained.

One of the best tidbits in this article is the link to Rand's process for testing tweet hypotheses: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/calculating-and-improving-your-twitter-clickthroughrate I love Dan's analyses and data, but results can vary wildly between different audiences. Rand's process for testing theories about your tweets (Does a word choice like "Realtor" vs "real estate agent" matter? Does referencing the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal get better click-through?) lets you figure out what works in your industry.