I’m a big proponent of being well rounded. Just as it is extremely important for an SEO to know HTML and CSS, it’s equally important for an SEO to have a basic understanding of marketing and business. Unfortunately, not many SEOs bother to stray from their main focus. It’s too bad.

Jennifer Laycock has a nice retort to Rand Fishkin’s piece about using Google personalized results in advertising.

In my opinion, they both slightly miss the point.

Rand talks about the famous 2007 Pontiac super bowl commercial where they say “Google Pontiac” and “discover for yourself…”

Put aside the irony of using a now defunct company to talk about successful advertising and let’s dive deeper into the ad.

Rand uses this example to talk about personalizing a user toward a domain. Jennifer points out why that strategy isn’t really optimal (Seriously, go read both articles…They open in new windows…. I’ll wait.)

They both make great points (even though I’m going to side with Laycock here) but they both fail to understand the real purpose of the ad.

See, car industries operate in multiple tiers of advertising. They have their top “brand awareness” tier, a “competitive conquest” tier, some middle tiers like credit and owner programs, and the lower “dealer focused” tier. None of these are official names, and I’m certain they differ from car company to car company, but you get the idea.

Believe it or not, most car ads are targeted toward a specific “persona type” who is likely to be in one of the tiers. This is all marketing 101 and clearly covered in marketing for dummies.

Different ads are shown to users based on where they are in the buying process. It starts with brand awareness, changes once the customer has a vehicle in mind, and changes again once they actually want to purchase it. Then there’s the whole idea of marketing to your own customers.

So imagine you have a 30 second super bowl ad. Who do you go after? Do you introduce a new model car, or do you focus on conquest by comparing that car to a competitor’s model? Do you simply build brand awareness? What about the current offers and incentives? You certainly can’t fit it all into a 30 second commercial.

Or can you?

If we look at the screen shot above, we can see all of those tiers clearly represented. The search results not only offer to take me to the Pontiac home page, but I also get results for local dealers where I can go test drive one. There’s a build and price link right there, and there’s also an option to view offers and incentives. All of the bases are covered.

Unfortunately I don’t have a screen shot from the 2007 super bowl, but I’m willing to bet that there were multiple paid campaigns running at that time to address the different segments as well.

From a non-SEO perspective, the marketing strategy was twofold. First, they was a subtle “hey, don’t take our word for it, go look on Google” theme to build trust among the users. Second, they managed to throw a broad ad out there that appealed to all of their pre-defined marketing personas. By going broad Pontiac was theoretically able to capture a larger segment of viewers. If they had gone the vehicle specific route and chosen a sedan, then they would have instantly cut the potential reach of their audience (as those interested in crossovers would have been lost.)

The “Google Pontiac” ad (to me) was nothing more than a shotgun in the dark approach. It was all about maximizing that 30 seconds to reach and captivate the largest potential audience – an approach that can be hard to understand when you only look at Google from a search marketing point of view.

Let this serve as a good reminder that occasionally we need to take off our SEO hats (white or black) and look at things from a general marketing and branding point of view as well.

You’ve probably seen the tweet on twitter claiming “Digg Hacked – Screenshot coming soon” and have been furiously searching Twitter and Digg for “digg hacked” trying to find out what’s going on.

Well, you’ve been had by a new marketing campaign. Digg wasn’t hacked.

If you look at the source code of Digg, you’ll see an ASCII art that looks like the following:

This is the supposed Digg hack, but a closer inspection reveals that there’s a URL and password embedded in the bottom of the ASCII art. That URL takes you to http://www.hellisnigh.com/ – a mere ad for the upcoming Dante’s Infero movie. There’s even a password in there for you to enter on 2.09.10

It turns out Digg wasn’t hacked at all, but that didn’t matter. All it took was for somebody to say something on twitter and everybody else furiously retweeted it and bought into the “digg hack hype” I’m sure whoever started this is close to setting a new record for retweets and followers per tweet.

Kudos to whatever marketing firm came up with this idea. It’s truly original and unique – now excuse me while I run to Tweet about “Miley Cyrus sex tape found – screenshot coming soon.”

Last month I talked about why having 1000 twitter followers doesn’t make you a social media guru. I got some great feedback, but one of the questions somebody asked me was “Ok, if it’s not about followers, what is it about?”
My reaction was nothing more than a facepalm.

It’s not about followers you idiot, it’s about engagement!

I can’t believe more social media mavens haven’t figured it out yet. (and yes, Nick I still think maven is feminine)

I’m going to let you all in on a little social media secret: It’s not about how many followers you have or even rating those followers; it’s about how you and your followers engage. It’s such a simple concept, but very few people actually understand it.

In fact, most people who are currently classified as “social media gurus” fall into one of the following categories:

1. They don’t engage at all. A good example here is your favorite band on facebook or Twitter. How often do they actually respond to fans or leave comments on their own posts? Most don’t. Some (I remember having a convo with Adam Duritz ) do, but in general most bands simply leave Twitter and Facebook to their PR teams or labels.

2. They only engage other A-listers. I’m not going to call people out here, but just go look at your favorite celebrity’s tweets. Most of them are only to other celebrities. This thing goes on a LOT in the SEO community too – where many A-list SEO people only reply to each other.

3. They treat their twitter and facebook like a press release. This is what happens when legal gets involved or marketing and PR end up supervising a social media person. Believe it or not customers DO want to year your PR pitches, but they want to hear them from an actual person – not a faceless corporate entity.

Then there’s category 4 – the people who actually understand engagement and get it right. There’s tons of these people out there, but they don’t go around calling themselves gurus.

See, followers are useless unless they actually click on links, respond to questions, and generally give a shit about what you’re saying. Go ahead, try asking a question on Twitter and see how many people answer you. You may be surprised.

Ok, that’s great, but how do I measure engagement?

I’m glad you asked. Forrester breaks the measurement of engagement down into 4 categories: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy, and Influence.

This model is a bit different from the current “Earned, Bought, Owned” one being thrown around, but I find it much more useful. EBO is great for measuring where you’re spending your social media efforts but it comes up lacking in the measurement department.

So what is IIII?

Involvement refers to the standard metrics I’ve been discounting in my last few blog posts. Put simply, involvement measures presence. Things like Followers, RSS subscribers, Friends, etc fall into this category. As I’ve been saying before though, they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Interaction refers to actions that people take. Things like @replies, blog or video comments all fall into this category.

Intimacy is nothing more than a measure of a person’s affection. Retweets, Thumbs up, Diggs, Sphinns, Shouts, and Votes all fall into this category.

Influence is just what it says. It’s the likelihood of somebody advocating you or your brand. Retweets, reviews, and suggestions are great ways to measure this.

That’s how to measure engagement, and that’s why social media is more than just followers.

To extend my previous analogy: Your huge follower-related e-penis may give you great influence, but you can’t can’t achieve intimacy with a giant e-penis alone. Interaction and Involvement are where your e-penis can make the biggest (giggle) impact.

I keep seeing the same mistake being made over and over: Companies keep choosing their social media department based on how many Twitter followers or Facebook friends they have.

It starts when an executive hears of social media and decides that his company needs an offering in that space. The executive soon discovers that nobody really has any experience in social media, but they’ve got to pick somebody. It’s then that you can see them frantically running around the office asking “Who’s got a Twitter account?”

In a world where we have metrics for everything it can be easy to simply look at friends or followers as a metric for determining social media prowess – and that’s where companies get into trouble.

Twitter and Facebook friend counts are nothing more than an elaborate measurement of virtual penis size. That’s really all they’re good for. I’ve talked about why friend counts are bad years ago, but nobody was even talking about social media back then. (those problems still exist by the way.)

The bigger problem with friends is engagement. As I discussed last year, the reason twitter bots are so effective is that people blindly re-follow anybody who follows them. If I want to get 1000 facebook friends I simply have to go friend request about 5000 people. It’s a safe bet that 1/5 of them will approve my request. That percentage is even higher on Twitter. In my tests I’ve seen about a 40% re-follow rate.

Engagement is what matters. How many of your followers actually reply to you? How many of them comment on your posts? What percentage click on links that you tweet? Go ahead and ask your social media person – I bet they don’t have any answers for you.

It’s not just companies that are falling into the “friend fallacy” though – individuals are even more to blame. Just look at how people describe themselves on their twitter biographies and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There’s a plethora of self proclaimed gurus out there. (personally, I prefer to call myself an expert rather than a guru.)

In fact, many of the people I consider experts (myself included) are taking an opposite approach to followers. Not only do I not follow people back unless they’re interesting, but I also block the spam bots and low-quality accounts from following me. It keeps my followers and people I’m following low, but it also keeps them highly engaged. My signal to noise ratio is great too. You won’t find many other people who do this though, as they like to point to that high friend count to re-enforce their “guru” status.

Whenever somebody professes to be a social media guru I always ask them the same questions: How much money are you making from Twitter? What’s the lift generated by your Facebook account? What metrics are you using?

Many social marketers will quickly change the subject when you start talking about actionable analytics and ROI – and for good reason too. See, the fact is that many of these Gurus have no idea how to measure their contribution to social media nor do they want to. Measuring their value may just show them how small their virtual penis actually is.

Social media, like all marketing campaigns, needs to be well thought out. You should have a clear goal, a plan in place to achieve that goal, and a method of measuring the results.

Just like you wouldn’t undertake an advertising initiative without a plan, you wouldn’t hire an advertising agency based on “number of dollars they spent” or a PR person based on “number of press releases submitted,” so why on earth would you hire a social media person based on how many friends or followers they have?

It’s time we stop comparing the size of our virtual penises and start looking at metrics that matter. Besides, we all know that my e-penis is bigger than yours anyway.

Lot’s of people are busy talking about Twitter’s growth and their journey to profitability. There’s plenty of discussion about new features and lots of questions about business models, but nobody’s talking about what the future Twitter account might look like. I’ve got a few ideas, and they don’t bode well for Twitter’s business model.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I recently picked up a WiThings Scale. If you don’t, the WiThings scale is a scale with a wifi card built in. It automatically tweets out my weight every time I step on it. It even keeps shareable graphs of my weight so that everybody can see how Fat I’m getting. Since you’re all curious I’ll go ahead and share it here:

So what am I getting at? Well, my scale tweets. My foursquare account Tweets every time I check in somewhere. My Blippy account will soon Tweet every time I make a purchase. DailyBooth Tweets every time I upload a picture. Do you see where I’m going here?

A good percentage of my Tweets will soon be auto-generated by other services that I use. My Twitter account is taking “what are you doing” to the next level and not even requiring me to tell it what I’m doing. It just hooks into everything else and does the rest.

Twitter is becoming less of a social network and more of a social infrastructure. Entire new startups are popping up that use Twitter as an underlying platform. There’s a shifting trend away from using APIs and instead just hooking up services via twitter. It’s insanely easy to post to and read from Twitter, and posting publicly even builds more awareness for your application; so why not use Twitter instead of a private back end connection?

It won’t be long until a good percentage of everybody’s tweets will be auto generated from some other service. What will happen to Twitter then? Will we still monitor it the way we do now, or will we simply rely on some other application to pull in the data and filter it for us? I’m betting the latter.

It’s only a matter of time before everything in my house is Tweeting. The TV will tell you what I’m watching, iTunes will tweet what I’m listening to, Xbox will tweet my kill/death ratio in Call of Duty, and Graywolf’s oven will tweet what’s cooking and how long until it’s done.

In fact, I wonder how hard it would be to hook up a wifi card and volume displacement gauge to my Toilet…..