The Week in Review

You’re Doing Social Wrong

Most indications point to social not being as effective as email or search. But is that due to social not working well or people’s poor attempts at it? It’s the latter. The reasons are: Facebook fan page owners still have yet to focus on quality over quantity; brands are not willing to spend money to get fans; and brands stop their spending after acquiring fans. (Social Fresh)

How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest

Anyone can run a promotion, but that doesn’t mean everyone should — nor does it mean that a promotion guarantees social media success. "However, if executed as part of a comprehensive social media strategy, social media contests can produce tremendous results no matter how large or small your business." Some key things to consider are starting with the end in mind, fully engaging the spectrum of audiences, and making sure that it’s easy to enter and easy to share. (Social Media Examiner)

Article Marketing in a Post-Panda World

The infamous Google Panda update has come and gone. So should article marketing, once a pillar of link building, still be part of your overall strategy? Yes, just a much less important one. If you plan on using article directories, you need to send them higher quality content — maybe 15-20 times a year. "Your link building activities should never be dominated by just one tactic. You need to have a blend/mixture for maximum effectiveness. If you focus on just one technique, you run the risk of losing all your rankings if that tactic gets devalued." (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

Why Everyone Should Hire ‘Social Media Experts’

Contrary to the sentiment of some, social media experts are valuable. Besides all the hard evidence, "as an SEO, I’ve long felt the brunt of baseless attacks by ignorant skeptics. I feel both a kinship and a duty to stand up for those who’ve had their profession ridiculed." The interest and demand for these experts is undeniable. The notion that social media experts only bring "common sense" to the table is unfounded — just look at the critical-knowledge areas in social media. This isn’t even to mention the examples of individuals and companies that have had big impact on improving KPIs, processes and internal use of social media. (SEOmoz)

3 Steps for Prospecting Productive Link-Building Queries

Link prospectors must: 1) search and qualify for the opportunity type, 2) identify and record a unique footprint from each qualified page, and 3) search for all of the footprints and record the opportunities. Read through this walkthrough, which includes some additional helpful resources to boot. (Search Engine Watch)

The Real Cost of Social Media

What’s the true cost of running a social media campaign? About $210,600, according to data compiled by Focus.com and presented in a nifty infographic. Factors to consider include staff costs, advertising and external fees. According to an eMarketer survey, the top benefit of marketing through social media is customer engagement, follow by direct customer communications and speed of feedback. (Digital Buzz Blog)

Conversion Optimization: 5 Places to Start

"One of the easiest ways to gain credibility with any business partner is to establish quick wins using conversion rate optimization. In terms of business impact, conversion optimization is a grand slam because you effectively reduce cost per action, increase revenue per action, and satisfy more visitors to your website." But where do you start? The top five places to consider are: 1) paid-search landing pages, 2) internal search results pages, 3) help sections, 4) product and/or service recommendations, and 5) top entry pages. (Search Engine Watch)

Technical Site Audit Checklist

Here’s a site audit checklist that offers an overview on how to do a generic site audit. It covers content, duplicate content, accessibility, canonicalization and internal linking, among other things. "At the end of your audit, don’t write a document that says what’s wrong with the website. Instead, create a document that says what needs to be done." (SEOmoz)

The Next Phase of Mobile Advertising

Emerging markets will be of utmost importance for the mobile advertising space in the coming years. "Smart entrepreneurs looking to reach consumers in emerging economies would do well to make mobile a major part of their advertising strategy." (The Next Web)

Google Aims at Online Display Advertising

Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president for display advertising products, foresees the online display advertising market to balloon tenfold, from $24 billion now to $200 billion in a few years. The "fundamental problem," he says, is finding how to get there. Google’s very own YouTube could be a key component of this endeavor. "Display advertising also influences search, and sales, much more than it is given credit for. It makes sense for Google’s overall model," says one pundit. (FT.com, The Guardian)

The Changing Scope of Advertising

As cliche as it sounds, the only constant in advertising is change. MDG Advertising has pieced together a helpful infographic “that clearly paints a picture of advertising’s ongoing evolution.” From the mass-marketing era to the new-media era; from channels to formats; from fixed to mobile; from outbound to inbound; this infographic compiles lots of data and numbers for your education. (Adweek)

Google Advisor Sounds the Alarm for the Likes of Zillow, LendingTree and Mint

Google recently unveiled Google Advisor, which is a one-stop shopt for consumers looking for financial products like mortgages, checking and savings accounts, and credit cards, among other things. “For marketers, it’s an opportunity to gather leads, and Advisor seems to be aimed at stepping up the volume of those leads.” (Search Engine Land)

How to Calculate Social Media Return on Investment

Loosely speaking, social media return on investment (ROI) is a measure of efficiency – return on inactivity, return on innovation and return on engagement. More specifically, social media ROI is “a measure of the efficiency of a social media marketing campaign.” After clearly defining social media return, it’s time to quantify it in terms of dollars and cents, which isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially when it comes to consumer insights and brand awareness. (Social Media Examiner)

Social Search: A Matter of Trust, Not Technology

Google and Bing are making a lot of noise when it comes to using social signals in its search results. Below the surface-level issue of which will ultimately beat the other in this game there lies a bigger topic: trust. After all, “search is about trust.” Search engines might find that a segment of its users won’t find social search all that appealing. “Social search’s success will be dictated and possibly limited by the level of trust that someone is willing to hand over to a group of friends. Initially, this will be easy for the younger crowd because they will have grown up steeped in this social world. Will it stay that way? No. Because never before in human history has there been more opportunity to abuse trust and it will ultimately make people less trusting than ever.” (Biznology)

Managing Affiliate Marketing in Travel

This rough guide to affiliate marketing in travel includes some of the main factors that are involved in building good relationships with affiliate bases, as well as ideas on how to optimize an affiliate marketing strategy. The four main bullet points are: major challenges faced by affiliates when working with brands, planning for seasonal peaks, building targeted deals, and optimizing affiliate relations and ROI. (Tnooz)

10 Biggest Lies About Online Advertising

"It’s just one line of JavaScript." Beware that lie — "just" one line of JavaScript can "deplete your business model, annoy your users, and destroy your user experience." This is just one of the lies about online advertising. Others include "clicks and click-throughs matter, reach equals cookies and display needs to be more like search. (Ari Paparo Dot Com)

Likes Must Be Turned Into Loyalty

So you’ve racked up likes for your brand — good for you. You’re now among the many businesses that have reached that critical juncture in Facebook marketing where you need to turn those likes into loyalty. Among the ways to do this is to make timely posts when users are more likely to be on Facebook, see discounts as a tool and not a strategy, and find other measures of success beyond likes. (AdAge.com)

What is a Pillar Page?

"A pillar page is a single page on a website that is focused on a core, focus keyword that the business is interested in ranking highly on in search engines. In essence, an SEO landing page." Here’s a look at a pillar page’s objective, how it differs from a landing page for a paid-media campaign like paid search, and the key elements. (Optify)

Persuasion vs. Manipulation

Let’s take a step back from the white hat vs. black hat debate and look at the broader issues of marketing ethics. The five scenarios explored here are: 1) simple alignment; 2) simple choice; 3) competitive choice; 4) unknown desire; and 5) altered decision. The bottom line is that it’s mostly about intent. (SEOmoz)

Recovering From Google Panda

As many know by now, Google’s Panda algorithm update did a number on many websites. Here are two successful-recovery stories — one from a furniture e-tailer and another from a discussion community. Among the changes they made were removing duplicate content, hiring copywriters and making better use of 301 redirects. (Search Engine Watch)

Context is King for Mobile Ads

Mobile ads are “making the necessary evolution from something pushed on to users to something contextual they interact with and derive value from.” Kiip and Tap Me are two mobile advertising startups, are putting this into full motion. However, the idea of context being king extends to all advertising as well. (GigaOM)

Streamline Your PPC Load With Excel

The AdWords interface is helpful enough, but it isn’t necessarily the easiest way to quickly hone in on problematic campaign issues and make bulk changes. Here are some Excel tricks to help you build, manage and optimize your campaigns. (Search Engine Watch)

Twitter Ads Fail to Deliver

There are a number of reports indicating that advertising on Twitter fails to deliver a return. One report concluded that advertising on the popular social network is more about image and branding, while another stated that its clients are very ROI-focused and are not “excited about Twitter as an ad network.” Most companies, especially smaller and midsized businesses, probably expect better returns from their own Twitter efforts than from Twitter’s paid-ad solutions. (Econsultancy)

How to Rank on Bing

Sure, Google remains the dominant search engine in most of the world, but Bing accounts for about 30 percent of all searches in the U.S. That means it’s worth your attention. Among the things Bing looks for are “editorial links,” pages with at least 300 words and the “meat” of pages served as plain text. (Search Engine Journal)

SEO Lessons from Lil B

Lil B, a 21-year-old MC, has asserted himself in the music world thanks to his savvy use of search engine optimization. With the help of a Web marketing pro, here’s a simple breakdown of how Lil B is using simple SEO principles to achieve huge success. (Wired.com)