Facebook Open Graph allows one to connect their site to Facebook without full integration, simply using new Facebook Meta Tags and the Like Button (a snipped of Javascript code).  Facebook is tracking these likes and building a “graph” of the Internet based upon the recommendations of your social network, and now they are including relevant results when you search Facebook for something.

This creates an opportunity for companies that are bringing their brand to Facebook to get additional exposure through Open Graph, which creates an incentive to use the technology.  This is exciting, as the move to the “walled garden” of social media threatened to disrupt the open world of search.  In the past, users could recommend a page on their blog, creating a “link graph” for the search engines to use, but now it’s easier to just click “share” and send the link out to your friends that way.  Without this part of the link graph, the search engines are missing out on the recommendations that they build their systems upon.

Open Graph brings out the ability to restore this, even if Facebook is the only company taking advantage of it for now.

The idea of a non-pornographic gentleman’s lifestyle magazine being promoted by Playboy is intriguing, and definitely capitalizes on an extremely well known brand.  In recent years, Playboy’s iconic magazine has been a money loser, with the value from the brand in royalties and merchandising, plus the pay per view movie channels being the dominant areas of growth.  With the collapse of well known magazines in recent years, it will be interesting in Playboy can extend their brand to the non-adult fare.

In middle school, our science teacher brought in an interview conducted by Playboy, which was an extremely good interview, with much amusement from the class about the source.  She told us she sent her poor embarrassed husband in to purchase the magazine for her to run off copies of the article for us to read.

While I’m certain that the school district had a copyrighted materials policy, I’m pretty sure that a purchase order for 50 – 100 copies of Playboy magazine would have raised red flags, even if they were able to cut out the pages of the interview without the “dirty bits.”

1. Site Structure
2. Links
3. Content

In the early days, the Yahoo Directory was the most useful source of traffic on the Web.  The small, editor managed directory (originally a static site by the Founders) was the “Who’s Who” of the Internet.  As Google surpassed Altavista, bringing relevant search results, the interest in directories died off.  While Hubs and Authorities never quite had the direct impact that was expected, being listed near other relevant results has a huge impact.  You wouldn’t build a car before figuring out an engine, and you shouldn’t build a website without building your core.  Your site structure helps spiders and users understand your site, content makes your site relevant if found, but links are the core of the site.

Submitting to primary and secondary directories will not create traffic over night, but it can create some of the core links that can help engines make sense of your site.  Getting listing in the major directories will give you solid links to help define your site, and additional listings in industry specific directories helps further define yourself.  All the SEO tricks in the world won’t give you quality traffic unless you build a solid Foundation first.

With Dunhill Vacations, we have a collection of directories that will catalog our articles as well, and when we do an industry write-up, we submit it to those directories.  Over time, we are steadily building up quality in bound links, much more effectively than link swaps or other dubious link building strategies.  Quality content with quality links pointing to it, it may not be sexy, but it’s still effective.

1. Actually targetting Jews with an advertisement for a “Kosher Ham” business seems really bottom of the barrel, a proud Christian or Muslim wouldn’t target their fellow members of faith with an anti-Christian or anti-Muslim business, would they?
2. They outrageously list the social groups they target, listing a few historically Jewish fraternities and leave out AEPi (Alpha Epsilon Pi), the Jewish fraternity.

In all seriousness, the point they make is that when targeting a group, you aren’t looking for 100% accuracy, just decent accuracy.  The US Jewish population is about 2%, targeting everyone looking for Jewish customers is pointless.  However, online we can develop sub groups with decent Jewish accuracy, and similar options exist for other populations.

For example, approximately 12% of New York City is Jewish, if you target people in New York City, you’ll get more non-Jews than Jews, but you are reaching 6 times more Jews than reaching just the United States.  Further, looking for keywords associated with secular Jewish culture (obviously a business making fun of Jewish dietary law as part of its snark isn’t looking for religious affiliation), you can start to reach a targeted segment.

Now, many, perhaps most Jews on Facebook won’t have ANY interests related to Jewishness on their profile, and if your goal is to reach all Jews, this will fail.  If you were running a political campaign and targeting Jews with a message, only reaching 40%-60% of the Jews on Facebook might not be enough.  However, for running a CPC campaign, it doesn’t matter what percentage of the Jews on Facebook I reach, what matters is what percentage of the people that I reach are Jewish.  Running an online small business doesn’t require “market share,” it requires reaching profitable customers.

If you only target people affiliated with ethnically aligned groups, you might find some segments that are 80% – 95% your target demographic, which means that you’ll get higher click through rates and waste fewer clicks.  People affiliated with those aligned groups, even if not of that ethnicity, might be useful to target anyway.  Someone that frequented Hillel events, even though not Jewish, is probably either a prime target for Jewish-themed T-shirts, either for themselves or as a gift, making your targeting even better.  National ad campaigns are difficult, finding potential customers for a business is much easier.

Social Media appears to be one of the interesting potential story, as a source of advertising dollars and business, search continues to grow, display ads are relatively stagnant, and alternative campaigns in new medias inches upward.  Despite it’s status as media darling, Twitter remains a small niche play, with popular Facebook game FarmVille having more users than Twitter.  Email newsletters remain big business, but the movement from getting content pushed into your inbox toward networks and feeds continues, creating new opportunities for online advertisement.  2009 looks to have finished as a slight positive in a down economy, and 2010 looks quite promising.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas.  Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on.  While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet.  This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story.  While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites.  Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone.  Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search.  Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

One exception, media buying.  For reasons that will perhaps never be clear, purchasing banner ads on websites doesn’t follow the open marketplace of the rest of the web, but the rather strange world of media buyers and sellers, with their high commission rates and huge selling costs.  I understand why $10 million ad campaigns might require some sales finesse and price breaks, I don’t understand why I can’t buy 30 second spots on a local independent station in the middle of the night without knowing a salesman and creating an account.  I really don’t know why buying banner ads also seems so convoluted.

When I have done business hosting ads and buying them, I’ve found the results pretty decent if you are targeted.  I believe that they are much cheaper than Text Ads for business reasons… a marketer with a credit card can buy Text Ads, it seems like you need to spend time talking to a salesman to do banners.  Given how many independent marketers are moonlighting on the web, it’s insane to have a medium only available from 9 AM EST to 5 PM PST, when the search engines will let me buy spots at 4 AM.

Step 1: Pick a Good Domain Name

A domain name is your address, what you will hand out, and what you will advertise.  Your goals are short, easy to spell, nothing to trip people up, and keyword friendly.  If you are dealing with cars in Florida, and your name is Jake, then CarsByJake.com would be friendly, start with your keyword, and be easy to spell.  FloridaCarsByJake.com would also be good, but JakesFloridaCars.com gets tricky because without the appostrophy, it sounds like your name is Jakes.  Avoid double consonants (two words, one that ends in a letter and the next work begins with it), and definitely do no “merge” it being clever, people will get confused.  I find dot-com extensions better than alternatives, but it may depend on your industry.  It’s been over 10 years since dot-net was the premium TLD and dot-com a negative one, but dot-net still has cachet in technology sectors.

Step 2: Register with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

You don’t get to play if you aren’t there.  Twitter is important for the ability to move information out there.  Facebook has a tremendous number of users and viral power, and LinkedIn is where the professionals hang out.  While you may not use all these mediums terribly effectively on Day 1, the sooner you open an account, the sooner you are ready to use it.  If you aren’t going to optimize for all platforms, also register with Ping.fm or HelloTXT for content syndication, that will let you move your messages to all platforms at once.  I would recommend picking a URL shortener for social media (I use Bit.ly) and creating an account with stats, this way you can keep your collection of short links and start to see what drives traffic.  For Facebook, you should also setup a Page for your business so people that like your business can Fan your Page, even if they don’t know you personally.

Step 3: Setup the Website and add Content

If you aren’t ready for a serious commitment, using a free CMS system like WordPress.com, or other environment that let’s you publish and bring your own domain name is important.  Make certain that you can export content later if you move.  Despite my historically building my own CMS platforms for SEO reasons, I’ve been finding WordPress.com a great platform for self-publishing, and I can always export to a WordPress.org (self hosted) system later and work from there into whatever I want.  Good content is key to success.  Learning to write 5+ blog posts a week plus updating the core of the site (Pages in WordPress speak, the static content part of any CMS) of information, adding images, etc., is time consuming.

Step 4: Get in the Social Media World and Blogosphere

You need to participate to get involved.  For Facebook, setup the appropriate privacy policies and participate in comments, Wall Posts and pictures.  Wish people well on their birthday, tell them when they put up cute pictures of children/grandchildren, be friends with your friends.  For Twitter, grab TweetDeck, start finding the appropriate Hashtags for your discussions and start sharing information.  With your blog, find bloggers posting questions that you can answer, and either leave a comment (if short), or answer with a link to their entry with software that will ping them with the answer.  Like any form of networking, participate.  Retweet good posts, share your expertise, and build up an online reputation.

Step 5: Using Content and Social Media, Promote your Site which Promotes your Business

This final step is how you pull it all together.  Write good content for your site on the blog, promote it through your new Social Media channels.  The better the content, the more likely you are to get Retweeted or linked to from other blogs.  The more links you get to your site, the better you will do in search engines.  The more you get Retweeted in Twitter, the more likely you are to get Followers.  The more you get mentions and links on Facebook on news feed, the more likely you are to reconnect with friends or come to the attention of customers.  SEO = keywords + good content + links… the more advanced part of SEO, you can get to that later, when you get traction.  If you need to hire an SEO expert, you will already have new customers from your web site plus a great starting point for the SEO who can see your keyword success to get started.  As you add content and social connections, your traffic will build and build, and if your site’s core information is good, you will successfully launch your business.

This is my first draft of this 5 Step Process.  I expect to come back and revise over time.  Comments, suggestions, etc. are all appreciated.  Feel free to Follow me on Twitter and Tweet this Post!

The Nielsen Norman Group describes the 5 iterations their announcement of two usability conferences went through, a very detailed process for planning an announcement.  Rather than blasting it every hour and losing followers, they are focused on a tight message that is under 130 characters for easy Retweeting and viral effectiveness.

I feel pretty hypocritical, seeing as how I’m just using Twitterfeed to feed my blog posts, but a real solution is on the to do list, and safe to say for a client I would never simply dump a headline written for the web and Usability/SEO to a twitter feed.

When doing early tests with Pack Your House, which was actually going out via SMS, we would routinely spend 3-5 iterations for each message, because you can’t send people repeated messages without upsetting them or running up their tab.

An interesting thing you’ll notice through the iterations, he dropped extraneous words, not vowels.  He communicated his information without resorting to short hand that his targets might not understand, carefully adding emphasis and scanability to his Tweet rather than confusion.

The Twitter system opens up some tremendous marketing channels for getting messages out, but usability will help determine the success or failure of this channel.