Ultimate Social Media Resource List
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This resource for social media is a compilation of other great resources, tools, and Websites from around the Web to assist you in your social media efforts, efficiency, and comprehension. Whether your interest is in social media marketing or general social media participation this resource list is invaluable in assisting you in your journey.
I realize there may be quite a bit of overlap in these lists so please consider that. Do you have a resource that I missed? Email me and I’ll add it to the list.
General | Digg | StumbleUpon | Del.icio.us | Flickr | Twitter | YouTube
General Social Media
50 Top Niche Social Media Sites, and Their Power Accounts
Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18
Joe Whyte’s list of social media sites by category
OnlyWire, SocialPoster, SocialMarker, PostToaster - Mass Social Bookmark Submission
50+ Social Bookmarking and Social News Sites
120 Social Bookmarking site by PageRank
Ultimate Social Media Optimization List
Digg
12 Must-Have Tools for Active Digg Users
The Digg Toolbox: 70+ Digg-related Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials
62 posts on how to squeeze the juice from Digg
Which Categories Make The Digg Home Page
Link Attraction Factor Title Check
Link Attraction Factor Keyword Tool
29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API
Top 10 Digg Tools to Enhance your Digg Experience
WordWeb - A Digg Visualization
SocialBlade - Digg Front Page Data
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon Tools from around the Web
The StumbleUpon Toolbox: 40+ Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials
10 Tools to StumbleUpon websites with ease
Del.icio.us
Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection
Comprehensive Listing of Del.icio.us Tools, Plugins and Add-ons for Social Bookmarking
Del.icio.us Toolbox: 180+ Tools and Resources
Del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions : All 150+ hacks
Flickr
The Great Flickr Tools Collection
Compfight - Flickr Search Tool
The Ultimate Flickr Tools, Scripts, and Hacks Database
Twitter Toolbox: 60+ Twitter Tools
5 Ways to Find More Friends on Twitter
10 Best Twitter Tools for Wordpress Blogs
All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place
Twitter Tools, Tweaks, and Theories
Twitter Tips - Tools for your Tweets
YouTube
The Amazing YouTube Tools Collection
4 YouTube Tools you probably didn’t know about
UnOfficial Sphinn Store Now Open!
So I was buying a few cool SEO and Social Media t-shirts the other day from Digg, Mixx, and eVisibility and thought how cool it’d be to have a Sphinn.com shirt. So I made my own on CafePress.com and this is how it turned out.
**UPDATE** Sphinn didn’t like the idea of offering these on CafePress through me so hope to help them get their own store started soon.
Side Note
The Poetic Prophet (SEO Rapper) has a new SEO rap out about Design Coding. Check it out!
Social Media Marketing with Podcasts, Vidcasts, and Blogs
I had the privilege of attending PodCampSLC today which is a podcasting, blogging, and vidcasting conference style of event where one go to sit in session to learn about various aspects of multimedia and applying it to a business model. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the whole thing but I’ll share what I did learn while I was there mixed in with some of my own personal recommendations.
According to statistics from the Omniture Summit, which I was unable to attend, there will be 8 billion dollars of ad spend on social networking this year. This is a 75% increase from last year 2007. By 2011, 12% of ad spend will be completely devoted to social networks and social media channels. So what does this mean for you? Well it’s kind of an eye-opener to see where the industry is headed. Blogging alone won’t give you the pervasive coverage you need to make your voice heard. A rich mix of multimedia is pertinent to provide enhanced content to your audience.
Understanding Your Audience
Before even beginning to outline a strategy for your social media marketing deployment you must really understand your audience. This is easier said than done. We hear a lot of marketers preach about understanding you audience and understanding your community but how exactly do you do that? Well, if you don’t have thousands to throw at in-depth demographic research there’s a few things you can do.
- Do some surface level demographic research with tools like Microsoft’s adCenter Labs and Quantcast to profile audiences that visit certain sites or are searching for certain keyphrases.
- Conduct some brief surveys. The strategic deployment of this will be highly contingent upon your industry.
- Use gut intuition. Personas are also a great way to classify stereotypical viewers of your media to taylor your message to them.
Different Multimedia Platforms
You might be wondering which form of multimedia you should be utilizing the most. I believe it was the CEO of Podango who was speaking when he layed out a pretty good rule of thumb. “Blog everyday, podcast every week, vidcast once a month.” The point is you need a good blend of media to really establish an audience from all different channels and platforms that have all different needs and desires.
The Impact of Multimedia on Search Engine Optimization
With Google’s Universal Search being such a large part of the search engine result pages (SERPs) it’s important that you have enhance media on your site to try to dominate some of the verticles that appear in blended search such as YouTube. This will allow you to own the SERPs while bringing in more traffic to your site.
The Impact of Multimedia on Social Media Marketing
Social Media thrives off audio, video, and imagery in additional to traditional copy. If all you’re doing is blogging you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. I’m not going to get into the four dominant personality types you need to be targeting but I will say that some of them respond differently to the same message in different format. If you really want to get all cylinders pumping then you need to outline a marketing strategy that’s transparent, pervasive, scalable, and robust.
Taking Shortcuts with Vidcasting and Podcasting
Between your families, work, hobbies, social network participation, school, reading, and learning I know the last thing you have time for is full blown multimedia production, right? Well rest asure there are a few shortcuts. For example, Buzzbooster.com was telling me about a service that submits your online video to 45 different social media channels and strips your audio and submits it in podcast format to a whole bunch of others. So you’re actually getting killing two birds with one stone but unfortunately I can’t remember the name of it. However, TubeMogul.com is similar one that is free and sends out to 23 different social media channels. In additional, there are services like CastingWords that transcribe your audio or video into text so you can post it in blog format and search engine optimize it.
Monetizing Multimedia
So you’ve done all this hardwork, have a big audience, now what? There are additional ways to monetize your media. Some ways are through:
- paid subscriptions
- paid sponsorships
- lead generation
One point made was that Web users have been trained to expect content for free so paid subscriptions are often times harder to push. You can find paid sponsors but unless you have a massive subscriber base and audience then most companies won’t be interested in forking out the big bucks. There are residual benefits through branding and lead generation which requires an additional marketing strategy to meet your goals in these areas.
One Size Does Not Fit All
When a lot of people thing of social video they think of YouTube. It was reinforced at PodCampSLC that YouTube is NOT an end all solution nore a outlet for the highest amount or best quality of traffic. Other channels like Revver and BlipTV can not only be easier to get your message across in but provide more qualified traffic all depending on your goals, niche, content, and industry. YouTube tends to be more focused on a younger audience while Gather.com tends to be more focused to adults 40+ years of age.
Summary
So in order to be a good Internet Marketer you really need to get out there. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a surefire one-way ticket to failure in the long-run. It’s also improtant to note that widespread multimedia is not the solution for EVERY client or industry either. The Web is changing everyday and it’s highly advisable to break out of your traditional habits and embrace the future to come.
Social Media Marketing Baptism by Fire
I recently guest authored a post on David Harry’s blog entitled “Social Media Pitfalls: 5 Lessons Learned“. In this post I discuss the lessons I’ve learned by diving into social media. My hope was that others could learn from my mistakes so they don’t make the same mistakes when getting started in social media marketing.
The reason this is so important is because social media done wrong can have some costly mistakes as far as reputation, time, and money wasted. So shoot on over to Huomah.com and give it a read. Hopefully it’ll help you out in your future endeavours.
Search Engine Marketing Goes Gangsta
I thought I had seen it all when Stanford computer science students went gangsta rap. MC Plus + recorded songs about binary code, programming, C++, and Java. Some songs make fun of “script kiddies” and while they are hillarious they aren’t very well done.
Now for the SEO/M world we have OG Charles Lewis (Chuck) also known as Poetic Prophet, from Pop Labs, droppin’ beats and putting a new “sphinn” on social media addiction, paid search, and link building. Chuck raps about search engine marketing techniques and social media as part of a daily lifestyle.
PRESS PLAY
His videos went up in November of ‘07 but I just barely discovered thems thanks to a Tweet from Muhammad Saleem followed by a Sphinn post from Danny Sullivan. While researching I saw that WebProNews.com had reported on this in November but apparently I missed it.
I love Chuck’s witty lyrics. He’s a guy who obviously knows what he’s doing. Here’s the lyrics to the link building rap video:
“You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement”
Check out Chuck’s YouTube Channel to see all of his videos.
Best Ways to Learn SEO
Rebecca Kelley, of SEOmoz, recently wrote a post on ShoeMoney.com entitled “How SEO is Like Guitar Hero”. The breadth of her post is an analogy of how learning SEO is like playing guitar hero for the first time. It seems extremely hard and overwhelming but the more you dive into it the better you get and the easier it seems. At that point, you advance to a whole new level and encounter the same thing all over again.
Figuring out the best way to learn SEO is hard. You don’t know where to begin, who to trust, where to look, what to believe, or how to begin. I’m going to highlight how I started and a few things I’ve learned along the road to hopefully help you decide how you want to begin.
At the very beginning I was working as a Web designer and when times were slow I was mentored by an SEO professional, Jason Miller of EngineReady, to help create landing pages for certain clients. In this process I learned the ins and outs of on-page optimization. It wasn’t until a few year later did I decide to further my education in search engine optimization.
Not knowing where to begin, I dove into the deep end of the pool swimming in an overload of information from blogs and podcasts that I found via search. The frustration I dealt with was that often times author’s information contradicted what I had just read a few articles before. I spent weeks absorbing all the information I could then began implementing and testing different strategies.
Before long, I was figuring out what worked, what didn’t work, who the authoritative authors were and who to ignore. From that point forward I’ve spent approximately 10-12 hours a week keeping up on industry news and blog publishing to keep my education current.
Learning SEO the RIGHT Way
An important thing to note is that every Website is different. What works on one site may not work on another. What worked yesterday may not work or work as well today. So the best thing to do, after learning the basics, is to begin testing yourself. Sure it’ll be a baptism by fire and you’ll make mistakes along the way and come across a few roadblocks
Make sure you seek out the reputation and background of the professionals that share their experiences and testing with you. Test results will vary for each Website, but there is a lot to be learned from others that can save you some costly mistakes.
So a summary of the key takeaways are:
- Reading and Research
- Conduct Testing
- Get Professional Training
Bill Slawski and Kimberly Sitting in a Tree…
It’s almost Valentine’s day and love is already in the air. I’d like to announce one of the biggest, if not one of the first, SEO hookups. Sure there are already married couples in the Internet Marketing business like: Aaron Wall and his wife, Chris Winfield and his wife, David Harry and his wife, Jeff Quipp and his wife. But this particular couple met via search engine marketing and I ask you “How cool is that?”.
So without further adieu I bring to you the search world’s dynamic duo, Bill Slawski (SEObytheSea.com) and Kimberly Block (learningSEObasics.com) aka SpostareDuro. The scoop is Bill flew out to Virginia to see her recently and they had a marvelous time. Kimberly is now flying out to Deleware soon to visit. Congratulations to the both of you and I hope you have a successful and prosperous relationship together.
If these SEOs were to mate, below is what their “Super SEO” daughter might look like: (forgive the really bad Photoshop work)
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Taking Advantage of Universal Search
An Introduction to Universal Search
Gone are the days where organic or paid listings were all you had to worry about. We now are in the times of Universal Search. Google coined the term Universal Search as it’s culmination of search methodologies. “It’s essentially the largest revision we’ve made in the past two or three years,” Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, tells TIME magazine. Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Ask have also implemented similar results into their organic listings. Some of the results you might find are:
- Image Results
- Online Video
- New Results
- Blog Listings / Results
- Book Listings
- PDFs
- Local / GEO Search Listings
- Traditional Web Search
- Product Search
- Catalog Search
- Movie Search
- Music Search
- Map Search
- Health Search
- Celebrity Search
- Job Search
- Recipe Search
- Financial / Stock Search
- People Search
- Comparison Search
What Does This Mean for Search Results?
Search results now are seen different by users. Eye tracking studies have been conducted by companies like Enquiro that track eye movement on search result pages. In the past, with Google search results, the hot spots of the search results page formulated an eye pattern of the letter “F”, also known as “The Golden Triangle,” that was positioned in the upper-left corner of the organic results. Now with Universal Search we have seen this pattern start to change. With thumbnailed images and video incorporated into the results, the “F” pattern has morphed into an “E” pattern. (SEE IMAGES BELOW)
This means Universal Search has had a dramatic impact on how we scan the page. With thumbnailed images being put in the limelight you might just steal that click away from the #1 positioned organic result if you have an enticing and relevant image. Have a sticky page for that user once they come to your site via Universal Search and you’re in. Typically, Google will keep a header bar on top of your page if they came through Google’s image search, but find some JavaScript to remove any framed bars from referring sites and you don’t have to worry about sacrificing aesthetics or your carefully crafted and positioned messages being pushed below the fold.
Are the Search Results More Relevant Now?
While that has yet to be determined, my humble opinion is “Yes.” It’s now easier to find what you’re looking for right off the bad. When conducting a search for “Britney Spears”, a fan may not be looking for informational articles or news but may be looking for enhanced media instead. Integrated YouTube music videos as well as thumbnailed images of Britney Spears combines the right mix of information, multimedia, and news results for that particular query.
Are Internet Marketers Taking Advantage of Universal Search?
Yes, but not as much as they should be. Internet marketers underestimate the traffic potential they can bring to their site by search engine optimizing their multimedia content. With proper naming conventions, accessibility attributes, and unique characteristics all embedded on a Web page with relevant content encompassing the enhanced media the traffic results can be well worth the efforts.
Not only do internet marketers now have to promote their Websites but they have to promote their content as well. In addition, links to images, videos, and syndication on various social platforms is the key to Universal Search success.
Usability or User-Experience?
Stoney deGeyter recently wrote a great post on when usability is more important than SEO. Stoney ends by stating “By fixing usability issues you can sell more while without having to spend a lot of money always trying to bring in a lot of new traffic. A little goes a long way. Once you are able to increase your conversion rates, every dollar you spend on marketing and SEO will be more effective and have a much bigger impact on your profit margins.” Stoney is absolutely right. Rather than spending more money or efforts for the #1 position, try improving the usability, accessibility, and marketing communication of your current site. Exponential growth is derived from such improvements and will equate to higher conversion.
With this article in mind I got into a conversation with a great and well-respected Flash developer, Dan Decort, about Flash and the caveats it places on usability and search engine optimization. My problem with Flash is that the increased load times make for larger file sizes, longer waiting periods, inaccessible content, inability to bookmark, print or deep link, no screen reader and mobile device support, uncrawlable architecture, and overall problems with accessibility, usability, and SEO.
Sure, Google can crawl a limited amount of Flash now, but that’s just Google. Other search engines don’t have that technology implemented yet. I’m sure Google places less weight on Flash content due to the inaccessibility of it to other users. We started talking about technologies like SWFAddress and SEFFS that almost serve as a cloaking mechanism for Flash. SWFAddress does “address” some of these usability and accessibility issues but I’d still choose static/dynamic pages over Flash pages any day. Yes, if you’re serving the exact same content to search engines as embedded in your Flash movie then you should have the green light to go ahead and do so, but you might be looking at running the site through a spam filter with Google to check your site with a fine-toothed comb.
Aside from SEO, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this discussion. After my ranting and raving about Flash, Dan made the comment that user-experience is more important than usability, although he didn’t discredit usability. To define the difference for you:
- Usability - a property of websites (and other systems and products) that relates to ease of use. Usability is commonly defined as having three core components: effectiveness (how well a task can be completed), efficiency (how easy or quick it is to complete the task), and satisfaction (the user’s perception or opinion of the system).
- User-Experience - a concept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and development efforts, as opposed to the system, its applications or its aesthetic value alone
It’s important to note that usability and accessibility both DO contribute to the overall user-experience as well, but while user-experience is an important element of information design it really should be the icing on the cake not the foundation of the skyscraper. Usability is what drives conversion on a Website due to the efficiency in of usage, findability of desired content, and ability to navigate through site architecture with ease. Flash user-experience provides bells and whistles to be admired by people like myself and Dan, but your average user isn’t going to care about the feedback of the site (animation, graphics, sounds, actions) as much as he or she is going to care about information retrieval and timely satisfaction.
I invite you to join the oratory of our discussions and leave your feedback.
Top 3 Unsung SEO Heroes of 2007
There are many great people who make the Search Engine Optimization industry a great place. There are so many honorable mentions I’d feel guilty listing my allegiance to them in fear I’d leave someone out. From my perspective, there’s three individual SEO specialists who don’t get as much attention in the limelight as they deserve so this is my tribute to them. Let’s thank these fine gentleman for bringing many things to light with the power of blogging.
Bill Slawski of SEObytheSea.com - Although Bill is well-known throughout the SEO industry, I still don’t think he receives the credit he deserves. This man has an uncanny ability of decrypting insanely ambiguous search engine related patents and translating them into plain English in terms the average person can comprehend. Don’t get me wrong, Bill’s an All-Star, he’s spoken at many conferences and has his fan-base but in my eyes he’s the MVP of 2007.
Sebastian X of Sebastians-Pamphlets.com - Sebastian, a.k.a. Sebastian X, is also pretty well-known in the SEO industry but I also do not think he’s given the props he deserves. He has carved quite a niche for himself being the ultimate guru in the programming spectrum of SEO. He has a wide array of experience with Apache, PHP, MySQL which he utilizes to always think outside the box with. You won’t find content like his much elsewhere so I recommend you check out his blog.
Marios Alexandrou of AllThingsSEM.com - I am sure I’ve read Marios’s blog postings time and time again in the past, but just recently has his blog really caught my attention. What I love so much is his updated SEO Expirements. Sure, I’ll come across experimentation here and there and even conduct my own, but rarely do I see it reported so straight forwadly in it’s own category of a site. Marios recently had a story hit Sphinn.com homepage regarding a career in SEO being a bad move. I love his insightful opinions on different things. So definitely check him out.
Jordan Kasteler is a seasoned professional and consultant in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, Web Design, Web Development, and all aspects of Internet Marketing. I am currently available for freelance SEO consulting and Website auditing. 
