Great post on the future of social marketing and social media today on Best Media Info:
http://www.bestmediainfo.com/2012/01/2012-when-social-marketing-will-become-marketing/
Social marketing seems to have passed the point of no return, and 2012 may be the year when social marketing and just plain old "marketing" become exactly the same thing. check the article though, there's more. His take on mobile platforms and how people will use the web is insightful.
If you haven't been paying attention to Google Plus in your social marketing strategy, it's time to wake up and get to work. And when I say get to work, I'm not talking about hard work. It's no harder than taking whatever you were going to post to Facebook and Twitter, and making sure you are also posting similarly in Google Plus.
Why is this so important? Because Google, still the monster in online search, isn't going away and rolling over just because of Facebook and Twitters success. Far from it. There's an excellent article at Search Engine land about how Google is ramping things up on the search side, with their new algorithm change "Search Plus Your World."
See the complete article here:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-results-get-more-personal-with-search-plus-your-world-107285
And start Googling, or get left in the dust!
Senator Rick Santorum just got schooled in SEO. He should have known better. As a public figure, he could have easily taken care of his a few years ago, but by not recruiting good web guys to own the web for his name and personal brand, he now has a (literally) nasty, dirty problem. See what I mean by entering the name "rick santorum" as a google search.
Also, see the article here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rick-santorum-fights-google-problem/story?id=14580822#.Tw312E-djqM
Don't let this happen to you! Google your own name now, and if you either don't appear, or crud appears, make sure and watch our video trainings and do what we teach to make sure you own the web space for your own name!
Learn more about Mikael and his mission at his website: http://mikaeldluman.com/
His last project was submitting a webmaster request asking us to create style guides for his new website. Here they are. Just another example of how one member is using the Social Marketing Blackbox!
Well, it's official, social marketing is worthless on Tuesdays. Yup, just keep your Tweets, status updates and videos to yourself, because nobody really cares.
According to thesocialweb Tuesdays suck big time.
According to Paul Sutton of The Social Web, you can post identical posts on a Monday and Tuesday, and just watch as Monday blows it away. He advises keeping a low profile on Tuesdays, and whatever you do, don't make any major announcements on Tuesdays, people just won't respond.
Recently Facebook did a complete overhaul of their "Like" button, and it's a LOT more interesting for marketers now.
Instead of just posting a "recent activity" update, it acts more like the "Share" button, posting a the full story. This will give the "Like" a lot more prominence in the users profile, which should result in more referral traffic to the website.
Don't have a Facebook "Like" button on your site? For shame! It's super easy, paid users of the Social Marketing Blackbox do one thing, log into their account, click on the Personal Webmaster tool, and say something like:
"Please add a Facebook Like button to my website." Give us the site info, and Voila! Your wish is our command. Man, we're good!
We are in the process of making some major changes and up-grades to the Social Marketing Blackbox!
There are too many to list, some minor, some major, so here's the biggies. But before I even explain them, let me tell you why we are making the changes.
The Blackbox system is designed to do four critical things for you:
- Account creation and other "grunt" work that is critical to your business, but not work that you, as an entrepreneur, should spend personal time on! As the "CEO and chief bottle washer" of your business, your time must be spent only on those things that are mission critical to your business. So the Blackbox steps in and does the rest.
- Personal Webmaster Tool on demand. This is another amazing feature of our system. These guys are GOOD. One site I had them build for me just 6 months ago generates over $10K per month already, using the Blackbox strategies and tools. And these guys understand every step of the process, from the under the hood construction to the SEO and social marketing aspects of any site. If you have a paid subscription, make sure and use the Personal Webmaster tool on a regular basis to get any and all of your website work done.
- Training. Our system offers a really sweet set of training on every important topic necessary to create success online. Hopefully you are already logging in on a regular basis and watching our short, easy to understand videos on topics of your choice.
- Distribution. Hopefully you understand that one of your most important tasks is content creation. You have a message, about your product, service, charity… whatever you are online for. You should be heavily involved in creating your own personal content factory!
*** Content is the currency of the web! ***
The core of your content is article creation. But what then? It's pretty easy to create articles between 300 and 500 words long-that's less than a single page in a word document. But once this content is created, it must be distributed, and distributed widely. So that's where the major Blackbox changes come into play.
*** We are in the process of changing one of our distribution options from Directory Submissions to Article Distribution. ***
Soon, you will be able to submit your articles to us, and we will not only distribute them widely throughout the web but we will also "spin" the content so that the article is unique to each article directory!
First of all, article content distribution is a superior way of getting backlinks to a site than directory submissions. As a matter of fact, from watching my own analytics for the last few years, I can assure you that the actual traffic from article distribution is far superior to that from Directory Submissions, and the links back to the site (for ranking purposes) are just as good. In other words, Directory submission is only valuable as a link building method (no natural traffic comes from it) while article submission gets both links and traffic. Paid members will be able to submit articles within the next 2 weeks, more info to follow!
The second big improvement is a major overhaul of our social sites listings in every category, from article directories, social sites, video sites, micro blogs, etc. Basically, we have eliminated any lousy, non-performing sites and added in the latest, greatest, hot sites that you need to be on. Again, paid members (Silver and above) don't need to think much about this, as we open the accounts for you ;-) The last major improvement will be in our bookmarking service.
Currently, you can enter the title, description and keywords for your websites, blog posts, or social postings in our Bookmarking Engine and we bookmark those sites with one of our own profiles. This is a great way to get solid backlinks AND direct traffic.
We are making a serious investment into our bookmarking tools, to ramp up the quality and quantity of the bookmarks for paid members.
So make sure you submit any and all of your blog posts and websites to the Bookmark Engine as part of your marketing MO, as some of these bookmark improvements have already been made, and right now you will get wider distribution through the use of the tool!
And it will only get better as we continue work on the tool through the month of March.
We look forward to helping you reach your goals in 2011!
We will be using the following page in Facebook this year, and posting up-dates and training etc. there, so go here and "Like" this to get some unique training and resources that will only be posted here: http://facebook.com/escapethematrix
Social marketing is a great opportunity, but it's also major pain in the neck for entrepreneurs.
The problem is, there's just too much to do. There are dozens of primary social sites, hundreds of secondary sites worth opening accounts at, and tons of different formats to create content in. To do social marketing well, you are going to have to create articles, blog posts, videos, slide presentations, webinars etc., and then distribute them all, to hundreds of websites!
To do this on your own is almost impossible. And even if you had super powers, you couldn't keep up with your larger, resource rich competitors.
If you are going to succeed as an entrepreneur, or independent marketer, here's what you have to do:
1. Simplify your offerings. Choose your very best opportunity (website) and put all of your energy into it. Don't even think of trying another site until it is profitable enough to provide resources for site two.
2. Find the right suite of creation and distribution tools for you. Obviously, we recommend the Social Marketing Blackbox as your distribution tool ;-) But you also need software to create videos, write or spin articles, etc.
3. Outsource. Again, the Social Marketing Blackbox Personal Webmaster tool is the simplest way to go here. Our staff is fully trained and experienced in SEO, web development, content distribution, analytics, blogging… and much more. Make sure had use the webmaster tool up every month, and make sure you have enough hours purchased to get done everything you need to each month.
4. Out-work your competitors. Most online marketers are lazy. This is to your advantage. If you are consistent and persistent you'll beat 90% of your competitors. The other 10% is knowledge and implementation. Make sure you log in regularly to watch the training videos and improve your skills. If you work hard and smart on your website, you will reach that magic point where the sales or leads just flow in every day, it's a beautiful thing!
One of the most successful social media campaigns ever is the Old Spice "Smell Like Me" campaign.
And before you think, "That's SOOOO 2010…" think again. The latest video pulled 3.4 million views the first week, beating the previous record.
See the video here:
Now if all of us entrepreneurs only had the budget of Old Spice. But meantime, we still do have access to the same channels, and can create and post videos as often as we want, for free.
So while we may not hit home runs or "smell like Old Spice," we can still use all the same marketing channels and amazing opportunities they are taking advantage of. Who knows? Some pretty low budget productions have gone big.
But meantime, there's nothing wrong with a ton of videos that get 50-100 hits each, you can build a goldmine with that.
Personal WebmasterOne of the most popular features of the Social Marketing Blackbox system is our Personal Webmaster tool. With this tool, your wish is our command. Any work you need done on your website can now be done, easily, quickly, and very inexpensively using this tool! Projects like: 
Changing your blog theme Installing analytics like Google analytics Adding affiliate banners Adding our "Ultimate List Of Plugins!" to your blog! Adding your lead capture form code anywhere on your site to help you generate leads
...or whatever else you need done!
TrainingAnother one of the amazing features of our site is the training library. Social marketing strategies require training, and you'll get the very best, cutting edge social media marketing training right here. You get INSTANT ACCESS to our library or over 200 amazing courses on EVERY important online marketing topic, including:
SEO PPC Facebook Twitter Content Marketing
... and the list goes on. Subscribe now to access this amazing, easy to follow and understand set of highly informative training videos
Site CreationAnother one of our fantastic social media tools is Site Creation tool. But you have to realize, we specialize in sites that PERFORM! We have many front page Google listings, and more importantly, so do our customers!
"I have MANY front page Google rankings because of the things I learned from Dave Sherwin and his system!" Kevin Sousa
Our guys are experts at conversion, and will build you a blog or website that has all the right "under the hood" features to get you to the top of Google!
The next feature of the Social Marketing Blackbox is our Social Engine Tool. There are HUNDREDS of social media sites you need to open to have success online. And guess how much money you make while you're slaving away opening these sites? None! This is menial labor that entrepreneurs just should not be doing. Check out how our Social Engine can save you many hours of wasted time, while getting you invaluable backlinks to your site!
If you have any experience online at all, then you realize the importance of backlinking. But... have you done it? Talk about a pain in the neck! It's time consuming, tedious, and has caused brain damage in laboratory rats! (OK, so we can't prove that, but from our personal experience we are convinced it's true ;-) One of the best types of links come from Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmark Marketing is a proven, effective social media marketing strategy.
Check out how our Social Engine can get you those invaluable backlinks SUPER FAST!
Social EngineStop wasting time figuring out 100’s of sites! Let us streamline and automate the process.
Directory EngineStill submitting your site to directories one at a time? Ouch! We’ll submit your site to over 400 directories!
Bookmark EngineSpend less time bookmarking your pages with our bookmarking tool, or have your personal webmaster take care of it for you!
"When I first heard about the Social Marketing Black Box program I was a bit hesitant not understanding what it was all about and being a real novice with websites, social marketing and not having any idea if I really wanted to change my old ways (they did use to work). Well it’s fantastic how the system the team has created is DUMMY proof its really like painting a picture by following the dots.. guaranteed success.
P.S. The site they built for me is fantastic, just how I wanted it!"
- Andries Johannesen, Australia
"I wanted a site built, but I don't know how to do it, so I used the Personal Webmaster feature of the Social Marketing Blackbox. I told them what I wanted in the morning, and by mid-afternoon my dream site was a reality! Much thanks to the Blackbox team!"
- Kathleen F, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA
"What you have done for me and my business in such a short period of time is simply fantastic !!! You set up an incredible professional looking blog for me, did the Social registrations, Directory Engine submissions, Personal webmaster tasks like adding analytics, headers, graphics etc.... ! Simply AMAZING !!! Many thanks for that!"
- Wouter van den Brink, Amsterdam, Netherlands
My wife and I are on the Social Marketing Black Box every day.We found that the tutorials are incredibly helpful and created a great foundation for learning how to run our internet business. They even built our website. When we first became members we signed up for the free membership to see if we liked it. We love it, so we upgraded! The upgraded packaged offered more training about internet marketing and the "how-to" increase online views to our website. Thanks SMBB!
-Steve & Rachel Tanner